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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE ART OF WRITING 



The 

Art of Writing 



George Randolph Chester 



* 



The Publishers Syndicate 

Cincinnati, Ohio 

1910 




^ 






COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY 
THE PUBLISHERS SYNDICATE. 



£CU316792 



Foreword 

I find, in going over the following pages, 
that I have taken a most authoritative 
position; that, in some cases, I have writ- 
ten with apparent conceit and even apparent 
arrogance. I shall not change the passages 
which might seem to justify such conclu- 
sions. I have tried honestly and earnestly 
to set down the results of my experience in 
such a manner that they should be of ac- 
tual help to those who wish to make a suc- 
cess of short story writing, and so have 
written frequently in the first person, and 
with vigorous decisiveness, wherever I 
wished to impress very forcibly certain 
points. It would be possible to remove my 
personality from these pages, but in doing 
so they' might be made less forceful; ac- 
cordingly they shall remain as they are, 
without apology and without appeal. 

GEORGE RANDOLPH CHESTER. 



Contents 

Page 

I. The Sordid Side, - n 

II. Apprenticeship, - 16 

III. Mental Equipment, .... 24. 

IV. Creativeness, ----- 26 
V. Imagination, 32 

VI. Observation, ----- 36 

VII. Democracy, ------ 42 

VIII. Sympathy, 46 

IX. Humor, ------ 54 

X. Industry, 57 

XI. The Business Story, - - - - 60 

XII. The Political Story, 64 

XIII. The Detective Story, - 67 

XIV. . Stories for Children, 70 

XV. Stories About Children, - 77 

XVI. Stories of Adventure, 79 

7 



Page 

XVII. The Love Story, - 81 

XVIII. The Historical Story, - - 88 

XIX. Dialect Stories, - - - - 90 

XX. Stories Not to Be Written, - 92 

XXI. Construction, ----- 94 

XXII. The Beginning, - - - - 98 

XXIII. Development, - 112 

XXIV. The Ending, - - - - 119 
XXV. Description, 120 

XXVI. General Observations, - - 122 

XXVII. Condensation, - - - - 125 

XXVIII. Length of Stories, 128 

XXIX. Editing, 130 

XXX. Preparing a Manuscript, - - 132 

XXXI. Marketing, 138 



THE ART OF WRITING 



c 



The Sordid Side 

"f*\ ommercialism" is here considered first, 
because it is the most flaunted of 
all bugaboos in art. We have an 
inherited notion that an "artist" must, of 
necessity, starve and go in rags, be a poor 
business man, and have a soul above money. 
All nonsense! That silly fiction is a relic 
of past barbarian ages, when no profes- 
sion but that of warfare really paid, either 
in honor or riches. To-day the successful 
artists, in every line, are abundantly re- 
warded, and only the unsuccessful ones, 
those least gifted with genius, must strug- 
gle with the wolf of poverty and whine 
that this is a soulless age. The period has 
happily passed when the literary worker's 
fame and profits were collected only by his 
heirs; instead, the writers of to-day are, as 
a class, rather keen business people, not 
necessarily dissipated or improvident, and 

ii 



prosperous enough to be self-respecting. 
Because you hope to be well paid for the 
creations of your fancy, do not, for one 
moment, fear that your finer sensibilities 
are to be destroyed. Instead, equip your- 
self for an artistic career, whether you in- 
tend to seek your expression through brush 
or chisel or pen, with the same care you 
would prepare for a commercial life, de- 
mand your just pay as boldly and receive it 
with as much self-esteem. Merely be sen- 
sible ! 

I speak of this so emphatically because I 
wish to combat, in the very outset, certain 
entirely false ideals that are quite likely to 
find lodgment in the minds of beginners. I 
doubt if there has ever been a time when the 
cry of commercialism was not raised anent 
matters of art, or when, on the other hand, 
artists did not prefer a hot porterhouse steak 
to a cold marble monument. It has come 
to be pretty generally acknowledged in these 
modern days that we shall be an extremely 
long time dead, and the full realization of 
this deep truth has the tendency to make 
one wish to bedeck this all-too-brief life of 

12 






ours with as many gay garlands as possible. 
In consequence the writers of this Gatling- 
gun age look upon their thoughts as truly 
golden, and pen them not so much for pos- 
terity as prosperity; nor are the thoughts 
any the less brilliant for their metallic sheen. 
It is all the matter of incentive, in which Art 
with a big "A" must say "brother" to As- 
sets with a big "A;" and both are improved 
by the association. An empty stomach is 
not absolutely necessary to the development 
of a large soul. 

Remember, too, that pose and perform- 
ance do not go well together. The gentle- 
men of long hair and Byronic cravats who 
call themselves Bohemians, and who spend 
their guzzling time with kindred spirits in 
the discussion of literature and art and mu- 
sic, never write real stories nor paint real 
pictures nor compose real sonatas. Those 
master students of the human soul whose 
names we revere worked as industriously as 
shinglers, and did not know that they were 
producing literature when they wrote it. 
Moreover, throughout all the time these 
then commercial-minded men toiled they 

i3 



doubtless had a thought for the diminishing 
flour barrel, and how the immortal work 
they were then producing might help to re- 
plenish it. In a word, art, as art, is never 
self-conscious. 

What does all this mean? That we shall 
have no more sincere dramatic or literary 
or musical or graphic or plastic art? By 
no means. These things can not die any 
jmore than the innate longing of the hu- 
man soul for higher and better and nobler 
things can die. Art will rise above all 
sordid circumstances in every age. It will 
find expression not alone in spite of, but 
partly because of the conditions that ham- 
per it. We need not distress ourselves 
about art. It will take care of itself. We 
can do little for it. It is as irrepressible as 
the storms of heaven, and in night which 
seems the blackest, flashes of its divine ra- 
diance will gleam so vividly upon our skies 
that they will dazzle the world. In the 
meantime, between those glimpses of divine 
glory, reminding us with startling vividness 
that within us all there dwells a portion of 
the Godhead, we will all of us continue to 

14 



face the elemental realities of life, food and 
clothing and shelter and social position — 
and these demand money. So keep your hair 
short if you are men, and long if you are 
women; talk "literature" but little, and work 
at it much; earn money, and spend it. 



IS 



Apprenticeship 

If you plan to earn a living by authorship, 
you must first very thoroughly prepare 
yourself to earn a living at something 
else; for the business of writing, like any 
other, requires a long and arduous appren- 
ticeship, and while one learns one must live. 
So prepare to work, and your temporary oc- 
cupation, or successive occupations, will be 
of great value in ripening that knowledge of 
the world without which no one may hope 
to successfully enter this field. Considered 
merely as a school of experience, the calling 
best fitted as a preparation for this partic- 
ular career should require one habitually to 
express thoughts and describe occurrences 
in writing; it should habitually bring one 
into contact with all phases of life ; it should 
be of broad and varied interests and should 
provide a steady income. The only occupa- 
tion which seems to fit all these require- 

16 



ments is the newspaper profession, and its 
value for this end is proved by the fact that 
from the ranks of the newspaper writers 
come more successful magazine contributors 
than from any other class of workers. 

The advantages of a newspaper training 
are many and obvious. In the first place 
the reporter writes much and rapidly, and 
he sees in actual print what he has written, 
an invaluable privilege, learning from day 
to day to correct his own style by experi- 
ence and comparison. He learns lucidness 
and directness, for newspaper writing per- 
mits of no unnecessary words. He acquires 
the habit of reliability. When he is sent 
upon an assignment he knows that he must 
come back with the item and that he must 
write it without a moments delay. He 
loses the tendency to absurd posing, for his 
associates have penetrated to the kernel of 
things, have made it their business to de- 
tect shams at a glance, and have the gift of 
ridicule developed to an art. Above all, he 
comes in contact with every sort of man and 
woman, with every side of life, with all hu- 
man pathos and comedy and tragedy. The 

17 



whole world, all its passions and its emo- 
tions, its weaknesses and its strength, its 
degradation and its nobility passes before 
him in review as a part of his daily routine, 
and if he has the proper mental equipment 
his work supplies him not only with mate- 
rial that he will use for years, but with a 
trained faculty for appreciating that mate- 
rial when he finds it. 

To the newspaper life there are, it is true, 
a few drawbacks. The haste with which 
articles are written is likely to encourage 
slip-shod English; one must work hard and 
at all hours; the associations outside the of- 
fice are not always of the best, and one must 
be of sturdy moral fiber to resist the forma- 
tion of habits which tend to make success 
impossible; there is, last of all, the tempta- 
tion to "drift" and to remain a reporter, 
which, while an interesting occupation, has 
but very little future in it. Still, weaklings 
are not likely to attain to much eminence 
anywhere, and every walk of life is beset 
with temptations to be fought, and over- 
come, temptations by the resistance of which 
to gain strength. 

18 



Some one, with wisdom and justice, has 
said that the newspaper calling is the finest 
in the world to get into to get out of, mean- 
ing thereby that it is an unsurpassed step- 
ping-stone to many other better-paying lines 
of endeavor; and, as a matter of fact, almost 
any profession can show among the ranks 
of its most successful men a large propor- 
tion of ex-reporters. For the purpose of 
the would-be story writer, however, a met- 
ropolitan daily is not to be recommended, 
especially in the beginning, for in the large 
cities the work is too minutely specialized. 
The so-called "country" press— meaning by 
that the newspapers in cities of two hun- 
dred thousand or less — is much better. 
There even the "cub" reporter is given a 
varying range of assignments which would 
never fall to his lot in the very large cities. 
He is likely to have his turn at the police 
route, at the courts, the city hall, the busi- 
ness district; he will have a chance to re- 
port a political meeting, a society function, 
a business consolidation, a divorce case, a 
slum settlement, a collection of pictures, a 
millinery opening, a "show." The result of 

19 



his gleanings and the irreverent manner in 
which he "writes up" these various affairs 
are likely to be somewhat unpalatable to so- 
ciety, business, art, and the drama, but it is 
all excellent training for the "cub," and con- 
tributes vastly to the range of his palette 
of colors. He attains an absolute and in- 
valuable sureness of gauging human motive, 
and after some four or five years of work 
along these lines, if he cares to go to a 
larger city he is almost certain of securing 
employment which will still further extend 
his range. The ideal preparation for story 
writing would be to tour the country in the 
capacity of a finished reporter, working in 
many cities — and to avoid, then, the impulse 
to become merely a polite tramp. 

One thing must be borne in mind: that 
newspaper men work very hard when they 
work, and when through they are likely to 
play just as energetically. The toiler in 
this line who expects to write a better-pay- 
ing grade of material than that resulting in 
his daily column or so must practice at it 
constantly, must give up a portion of his 
leisure to more serious literary effort, and 

20 



must try incessantly, from the time he starts, 
to write magazine stories. If a reporter will 
begin by religiously devoting one solid hour 
each day to this attempt, never faltering, 
never wavering, keeping the end steadfastly 
in mind, for years if need be, in spite of all 
discouragements, he is bound to succeed if 
the gift of story- writing is in him; and there 
is no other way! It seems much to ask, but 
it is no greater price than is demanded for 
eminent success in any other line. 

There are other apprenticeships which 
have proved valuable, other walks of life 
which have produced their quota of story- 
tellers. One modern success was a school 
teacher on the East Side in New York. The 
human interest in her stories was so pro- 
found that people of every degree under- 
stood and appreciated them. So long as she 
wrote of her actual environment her success 
was unbounded. When she attempted to 
wander off into realms with which she was 
not so familiar, her stories were but medi- 
ocre. Had she had a wider experience of 
life, it is not only possible but highly prob- 
able that she could have treated of univer- 

21 



sal conditions and have produced what yet 
remains to be written — the great American 
novel. 

Another successful writer was an assist- 
ant district attorney, a club man in private 
life, and officially in daily contact with crim- 
inals of all degrees. He combined these 
two phases of life with great deftness, and 
wrote stories along both lines, separately 
and in combination, which have earned him 
a distinct place in the magazine field and 
renders him an assured income of very com- 
fortable proportions. 

Writers of many other previous occupa- 
tions have been more or less successful, but 
in all of them the fundamental principle was 
the same. Their positions were such that 
before they wrote successfully they had 
come in contact with a limitless number of 
people, and so intimately that they were 
able to study them in close comparison. It 
is not possible for all to be newspaper re- 
porters, nor school teachers, nor district at- 
torneys, but whatever pursuit in which one 
is placed, by determination or by circum- 

22 



stances, where there are opportunities for 
study of varied humanity there are possi- 
bilities to gain an understanding of the hu- 
man soul, and that is the first and the great- 
est requisite of the story-writer. 



23 



Mental Equipment 

When the apprentice is finally 
able to take up authorship as 
a serious career, he will not 
call his output "literature" any more than 
a veteran reporter calls himself a "jour- 
nalist." The ejphemeral writing of no pe- 
riod has a right to call itself by any high- 
sounding title. Literature is hoary-headed, 
and some of it, it must be confessed, is even 
senile and decrepit. It attains the dignity 
of its title only with age, with the passing 
of time which proves its right to continued 
existence by its having continued to exist. 
However, the more or less involved writing 
of the past is to be valued no particle above 
the crisp and lucid writing of the present. 
The latter needs only to be winnowed, and 
out cf the mass that is now being produced 
there is no doubt that the usual proportion 

24 



will be found of permanent value. It is only 
that our nearness to it interferes with the 
perspective. 

You yourself may give your name to this 
coming epoch of American literature; but 
you will not choose authorship as a profes- 
sion; authorship will choose you. If you 
have the necessary qualifications they will 
not let you rest; and this brings us to the 
matter of equipment. 

Leaving aside the purely mechanical re- 
quirements of a good command of English, 
which must of course be had if you expect 
to enter this field, you must have these seven 
gifts: Creativeness, imagination, observa- 
tion, democracy, sympathy, humor, and in- 
dustry. 



25 



Creativeness 

If one has not the same instinct which 
would urge him to become an inventor, a 
composer, an explorer, a pioneer in any 
walk of life, he will succeed only in becoming 
a copyist, and a copyist earns but a copyist's 
pay. A story, to be interesting, must be full 
of the same inventive faculty which would 
go to the fashioning of a wireless motor, or 
any other triumph of constructive ingenuity. 
The newspapers frequently contain true 
stories which are alive with dramatic inter- 
est, and many which would at first glance 
seem but to need polishing to reveal them- 
selves as gems of fiction, and indeed, of many 
of these stories it is often said that they are 
"as good as a romance." This is seldom, 
if ever, entirely true. On examination these 
interesting occurrences will be found to be 
lacking in some vital element, and if turned 

26 



directly into fiction they would seem but 
very tame. 

The most dramatic of real life happen- 
ings are to be looked upon as but raw ma- 
terial. Their great fault lies in the fact that 
they are abnormal, else they would not be 
considered as news; and it is not the abnor- 
mal which proves of the greatest worth in 
fiction. To be able to construct the nor- 
mal, or rather to deal with the abnormal so 
that it shall seem to be normal, or shall il- 
lustrate the normal by emphasizing its di- 
vergences, is the true creative art in story- 
telling. To make people say, when they 
have read some clever characterization, 
"Why, I know people exactly like that," is N 
to have achieved a triumph, and yet, to ac- 
complish this requires a high form of cre- 
ativeness. 

"To hold, as 't were, the mirror up to 
nature" is quite as much the province of fic- 
tion as it is of the drama. To offer this re- 
flection is, too, the ideal of the painter and 
the sculptor; yet, when the finished product 
of any of these arts is examined it will be 
found that the mirror is a deceptive one in 

27 



that, while seeming to be accurate, it re- 
flects nothing with absolute fidelity. Upon 
the stage all emotions are exaggerated, alL 
action is accelerated, all motives are inten- 
sified, all characters are deliberately over- 
drawn, conversations are condensed and ab- 
breviated so that they come directly to the 
point that must be made ; yet with all these 
distortions, or, to speak more truly, by 
A means of them, the effect of reality is pro- 
duced. The most brilliant conversation of 
real life, if transferred verbatim to the stage, 
would become a dreary and a tedious thing 
because of the lack of concentration and 
crisp directness. 

The artist who paints a picture of an 
ideally beautiful woman spends much time 
in the search of a model who will exactly 
meet his requirements, and yet when he 
finds her he does not paint a portrait of her. 
He corrects the inevitable defect. He paints 
a perfect nose, perhaps, upon an otherwise 
imperfect countenance. Perhaps in forming 
his ideal figure he paints the head of one 
woman, the bust of another, the arms and 
limbs of still another. The sculptor pro- 

28 



ceeds in exactly like fashion. Nothing is 
perfect. It remains for the artist to create 
perfection, and he achieves this ideal in ex- 
act proportion to his skill and to the perfect- 
ness of his conception. So, while the writer 
of fiction must invariably go to real life for 
his models, he must never attempt to make 
them mere portraits. He must supply what 
they lack, and in this his creativeness must 
come into play. 

This applies not only to character-draw- 
ing and description, but to plot and inci- 
dent as well. Out of an approximate half 
dozen characters and half dozen scenic back- 
grounds and half dozen incidents the writer 
must create an entire new world, and yet 
one illustrative of the world we all know. 
His characters, if he has wrought wisely and 
well, will be found, on close analysis, to be 
like no living people whom any one has ever 
met, and yet the most of them must seem 
like people whom we all have known. Only 
the central actor or actors in your drama 
should be unusual, and not always even 
these. The incidents will be found, on de- 
liberate study, to occur with an opportune- 

29 



{must seem to be occurring most naturally* 
jiess never met with in life, and yet they 
This is the true creative power, and without 
it no writer can succeed. 

As an exercise, try to set down, accu- 
rately and briefly, confining yourself to a 
hundred words each, what you think you 
know of the characters of ten of your neigh- 
bors or acquaintances. When you have 
done this, go over each commentary care- 
fully and with calm, deliberate judgment. 
You will find that, unconsciously, you have 
exaggerated out of its true proportion some 
characteristic of each person, and have omit- 
ted to give due prominence to certain off- 
setting characteristics. Try as you may to 
be fair, you will find that your sense of jus- 
tice has been outweighed by your personal 
prejudices, even at the time when you were 
trying to be most judicial. Aiding your 
prejudices, your creative faculty has already 
been at work. This is one of the psycho- 
logical reasons why "gossip" is seldom, if 
ever, true. 

Revise these brief character-drawings 
rigidly, and compel yourself to be absolutely 

30 



just. You will find that your characters in 
the second writing are not nearly so pic- 
turesque or interesting as in the first, where 
your creative faculty had unconsciously 
heightened their coloring. 

Now write the ten character drawings a 
third time, allowing your creative faculty 
full play, and build up the characters as 
they would be useful to you in fiction, exag- 
gerating them all you like but still com- 
pressing your estimations into the hundred- 
word limit. You will find now, if your 
work has been well done, that your people 
have become more real to you than the per- 
sons from whom they* were drawn. They 
are warmer, more insistent of life and mo- 
tive. Building upon -necessarily imperfect 
types, you have created personages entirely 
typical, in place of partly so, of their 
leading characteristics. This illustration, 
though perhaps a lame enough one, explains 
what I have been trying to tell of the dif- 
ference between cold fact and colorful fic- 
tion, between imperfect realism and more 
perfect idealism, between copyism and cre- 
ativeness. 

3i 



Imagination 



Imagination goes hand in hand with the 
creative faculty. It not only builds up 
in advance the ideal which the creator 
tries to attain, but it furnishes the accessory 
detail which places that ideal in its logical 
environment. It supplies the waving trees 
and the green grass and all the scenic back- 
ground against which the tragedies and 
comedies of your mimic life are enacted. It 
is by imagination's magic aid that the men 
and women of fiction seem to truly and ac- 
tually live and move and have their being 
in the minds of their creators. 

It is probably a very safe venture to state 
that every successful writer sees his char- 
acters as vividly as if they were in the flesh. 
They walk abroad, and the sun shines on 
them; the heat of midday warms them and 
the breezes of night chill them; they re- 
spond to every phase of emotion; their 

32 



hearts beat under the thrill of love; their 
blood surges with hate; their eyes dim with 
tears. They are real, virile, human beings, 
and, having fixed in his mind the motif of 
his plot, having devised his situations, and 
having brought into created being the peo- 
ple who are to work out his comedy or his 
tragedy, the writer gifted with this wonder- 
ful faculty of imagination has but to keep 
the eye of his mind steadfastly upon his 
characters and watch them work out their 
story for him. He only needs to set down 
what they do and say. 

Try a simple test of this. Place in your 
field of mental vision a man and a woman. 
Let the woman be, say, brunette and viva- 
cious, the man tall and stern. They are 
standing amid bleak trees. The cold twi- 
light is coming on. There are little flakes 
of snow in the air. The man suddenly 
stoops and picks up something from among 
the dry leaves at his feet. The woman 
as suddenly springs for it and tries to 
take it away from him. Are they laugh- 
ing when they do this, or are they in des- 
perate earnestness? Look at them and see, 

33 



What is the object over which they are 
wrestling? It it a tell-tale letter, a docu- 
ment of importance, or perhaps a kerchief 
with a strange initial embroidered in the 
corner? It is a little too dark to see from 
a distance what the object may be, but there 
is just a glint of white. 

With these two characters and this situ- 
ation in your mental vision, keep within 
sight of the man and the woman, and see 
what they do. Construct your own story. 
Go gack and create a series of incidents 
which might have led up to this situation. 
Go forward and create the climax to which 
this leads, but always keep the imaginative 
vision of the two, as if in the actual flesh 
and blood, in your mind. / There is a house 
near by. You can see a gleam of light 
through the half-denuded branches of the 
trees. Who is in that house? Is it the 
man's wife or the woman's husband? Is it 
the man's father and mother or the girl's? 
Or are these two man and wife, and are 
children there? Out of your knowledge of 
probable human events you may select a 
thousand hypotheses to form a background 

34 



and an explanation and a denouement for 
this man and this woman among the trees 
in the chill twilight struggling for the pos- 
session of something that glints white in 
their hands; but if, while you pursue the 
contributory facts, you lose clear mental 
vision of the actual features and bodies of 
the man or the woman, of the salient points 
of their scenic environment, your imagina- 
tion is at fault and you can not write inter- 
estingly. Mere creativeness without imag- 
ination is the cause of the dry-as-dust sto- 
ries you read/\ You must have both, and 
they must work in absolute harmony, nei- 
ther one operating to the detriment of the 
other. 



35 




Observation 

Tis is the faculty upon which both 
creation and imagination are built. 
After all, we have finite minds, and 
man only creates after known forms; he 
only imagines upon material foundations. 
Our most brilliant castles in the air are but 
more delicate variants of familiar structures 
of brick and stone ; the most expert builders 
of air-castles, then, are those who have most 
closely observed and mentally indexed to 
minute detail our mundane castles. 

There is no end to the store of informa- 
tion, scarcely obtainable from reference- 
books, which the observing mind will and 
must acquire. What wild flowers and what 
garden flowers bloom in certain months? 
What trees are indigenous to certain local- 
ities, and what are their characteristics of 
sprouting their leaves and developing them 
and shedding them; of blossoming and bud- 

36 



ding and bearing fruit? Have you noticed 
how the white under sides of leaves, while 
fluttering up in a breeze, give quite a differ- 
ent shade of green to a tree? Have you ob- 
served the differing apparent color of still 
or running water at differing times of the 
day, at differing times of the year, under 
differing atmospheric conditions? How 
many common insects can you recall and 
describe? What effect has a frown upon 
the other features of a man's countenance? 
How many sorts of sunsets, as infinite in 
their variety as the shapes of clouds can 
you at this moment mentally catalogue and 
briefly describe? Have you ever noticed the 
peculiar heave of the body given by a man 
straightening up under a hod of brick, or 
the unconscious rhymthic pauses, for rest 
of the muscles, indulged by a man mixing 
mortar? 

At this moment, as an exercise, try to de- 
scribe the facial expressions of ten men, all 
between the ages of thirty-five and forty, all 
differing, and yet none abnormal. Give to 
each some characteristic mannerism or ges- 
ture, due to nervousness or habit. Try to 

37 



A 



write the descriptions of these men, con- 
fining yourself to fifty words for each one, 
yet allowing your descriptions to be full 
enough to convey a satisfying mental pic- 
ture. Let us stand these ten men up in a 
row and see what they look like : 

"Number one is short and fat, with wide 
lips and wide teeth and a wide nose. His 
round cheeks are pink like a young boy's, 
and his whole expression, except for the 
shrewd lines about his eyes, is one of almost 
cherubic infancy; yet every once in a while 
he winks almost imperceptibly with his right 
eye to emphasize some minor point in his 
conversation. He is very self-important, is 
number one, and jolly, too, but nevertheless 
crafty." 

Let us count this. Seventy-nine words. 
Too many by twenty-nine. This, however, 
is the first writing, just as it occurred to us. 
Now we must edit it and reduce our num- 
ber of words to the given figure without sac- 
rificing the picture. Let us try. Here is the 
second attempt: 

"Number one, self-important and appar- 
ently jolly, is short and fat, with wide lips 

38 



and wide teeth and wide nose. His round, 
pink cheeks make him seem of almost che- 
rubic infancy, but shrewd, crafty lines hem 
his eyes, and occasional sly winks flicker 
from the right one while he talks." 

So much for Number one. Right after 
or immediately preceding his description, he 
ought to say something brief and pointed 
which will further bring out his character, 
and every time he is brought anew into your 
story, brief reference should be made, as he 
speaks, to his receptive cherubic appearance 
or his craftiness or his wink, thus keeping 
his picture fresh in the mind of your reader. 

Now, without losing sight of this guile- 
ful gentleman, let us take the next one in 
line: 

"Number two has a mustache cut off in a 
stiff line above his upper lip, and it seems to 
bother him a great deal, for his nervous 
hand is constantly straying to it, trying to 
put the invisible and long-since-clipped ends 
into his mouth. For the rest, he is lean and 
cadaverous, with a narrow forehead and 
shifting gray eyes and stiff, wiry hair, and 
he has an air of being constantly upon the 

39 



alert lest some one might tap him suddenly 
upon the shoulder and tell him that he is 
arrested." 

Ninety-four words. We have been very 
extravagant in our analysis of this interest- 
ing character. We must cut down his de- 
scription, however, to almost one-half, and 
still retain the same strength of portraiture 
and character-drawing; for, observe this, no 
portrait description, unless it conveys with 
it an idea of character, is worth the setting 
to paper. 

This condensation is a much more diffi- 
cult task than the other, but it must be done. 
Here is the result : 

"Lean and cavaderous number two has a 
narrow forehead, shifting gray eyes, and 
stiff, wiry hair. His hand strays nervously 
to his straight-clipped mustache, trying to 
put into his mouth the missing ends, and he 
seems constantly alert lest a sudden tap 
upon the shoulder might mean his arrest." 

Merely by way of illustration two of these 
ten characters have been described. Por- 
tray the other eight yourself, still retaining 
clearly the mental pictures of all the ones 

40 



previously brought into existence, standing 
in their row, more or less impatiently, ac- 
cording to their natures, and you will find 
to just what degree your powers of obser- 
vation have been unconsciously at work. 
If you can not go further than four more 
distinctly drawn characters, cultivate your 
observation. Study the faces of people 
whom you meet. Watch their actions. It 
should be said, however, that a deliberately 
cultivated faculty of observation will never 
completely take the place of a natural one, 
one which, arising through a universal in- 
terest in all objects and in all surroundings 
of life, has taken unconscious note of all its 
minute and vital details. The importance 
of this faculty can scarcely be overestimated, 
as you will discover to your later humilia- 
tion if you set down details without know- 
ing them to be entirely accurate. You 
would make yourself very foolish, for in- 
stance, to have flies or mosquitoes annoy a 
character in your story at some mountain 
resort, for at very easily accessible heights, 
quite delightful to human beings, flies and 
mosquitoes can not exist. 

4i 



Democracy 



Democracy is essential, but it must be 
instinctive, not forced or self-con- 
scious. You must talk with both 
bank presidents and ditch diggers, as you 
have opportunity, with the same personal 
interest, an interest which arises not from 
mere curiosity nor even from definite pur- 
pose, but from your innate brotherhood, 
which makes these and all grades between 
and beyond but men, and human, and 
closely akin to your own clay. If you can 
do this without priggish inner aloofness, 
without toadyism on the one hand, or, upon 
the other, without the condescension which 
you fondly but futilely believe that you can 
conceal, you will become intensely inter- 
ested in the struggles, the failures, the ambi- 
tions, and the triumphs of both, and you will 
gain the sometimes humiliating but always 
wholesome lesson that there is but very lit- 

42 



tie difference in any of us, except as to the 
merest of externals. Strip the roughened 
hide from your ditch digger and the mas- 
saged and velvety skin from your banker, 
take from the one his probable crudities of 
language, and from the other his more or 
less affected niceties of speech, and you will 
find their code of ethics much alike, their 
humanity exactly the same. They have the 
same capacity for love and hate, the same 
self-struggles, the same belief in their own 
preponderance of good above evil. 

It must be your task to have as much as- 
sociation with as many different sorts of 
men as possible, to strip from them this 
outer husk of use and habit, heredity, train- 
ing, and environment, and lay bare the hid- 
den man. Find this first, then you can re- 
store the shell and study with intelligence 
divergent modes of thought and habits of 
life, and the varying expressions of these 
that are made necessary by different sur- 
roundings and opportunity. After all, you 
are searching for the undying mysteries 
of immortal humanhood, a recognition of 
which must be at the root, if not at the sur- 

43 



face, of every worth-while story, whether it 
be comedy or tragedy; and you are just as 
likely to find your soul problem in a squalid 
tenement room as in a Fifth Avenue man- 
sion, or just as likely again, avoiding these 
two extremes, to find it in some pleasant 
home of the moderately well-to-do, or in 
some cottage of that large class which, 
though without hope of riches, has fought 
away the threat of poverty. 

A writer must be of no caste or class. He 
must be of all castes and all classes, for the 
problem of life is infinitely larger than en- 
vironment or custom, or accidents of birth 
or breeding or wealth. Remember that the 
people about you, as distinctive and as indi- 
vidual as they may be, are, after all, as 
viewed in their true perspective with crea- 
tion, ephemeral creatures of no consequence, 
who live but for a day and flutter their idle 
lives away until they die in the chill of the 
evening by uncounted thousands, without 
having left any impress whatever upon the 
earth that bore them, or upon its vital af- 
fairs. A hundred years from now perhaps 
not one out of all the people you know will 

44 



be remembered; but humanity itself, with 
which, on the final analysis, you deal, is ever- 
lasting. If you are most fortunate you may 
meet men of large affairs, but even among 
these there are very few whose deeds, whose 
graves, whose very names will not be quickly 
forgotten, and even these few are but ordi- 
nary clay. Beneath your story, then, of 
their trifling emotions and the puny epi- 
sodes in which they figure, there must be 
something universal, something which ap- 
plies, just as well in one age as in another, 
to all humanity in its larger relation to the 
spirit of all things. It is not always pos- 
sible to segregate this kernel of universal 
humanity, to put your finger upon it, to say 
that this deep, underlying truth is the thing 
you wished to prove or to illustrate; but 
you may be quite sure that if your story 
awakens a quick response in the minds and 
hearts of the majority of your readers, you 
have, perhaps by blind instinct, woven a 
grain of this intangible leaven into your 
work. 



45 



Sympathy 



Sympathy must be a part of your de- 
mocracy, and a large part. You 
must try, in the attempt to under- 
stand yourself, to obtain an understanding 
of every other man. You must try to know 
his mental outlook; to find out what he 
thinks and why he thinks it. You must 
bring yourself to appreciate precisely why 
the horse-thief stole the horse, how he jus- 
tified himself in that act, and sympathize 
with him in so far as to see why, had you 
been in his place, with his heredity, train- 
ing, environment, and mode of thought, 
you, too, would have stolen the horse and 
felt that you had a legitimate excuse. 

You can not paint the woes of others un- 
less you yourself can, by comprehension at 
least, suffer that woe. Actual suffering 
would bring you nearer to an understand- 

46 



ing of it, perhaps, but it might also blunt 
your other faculties of creation, imagina- 
tion, and observation, and blunt, too, your 
desire to observe, to imagine, and to create; 
but so long as you are thoroughly conscious 
of the capacity to suffer, so long as there lie 
in you the conscious elements of woe and 
of sorrow, you can project yourself into that 
frame of emotion long enough and clearly 
enough to analyze it, and to set down its 
salient features. And that capacity can 
come about only through sympathy. 

Shut yourself in for a moment. You are 
now a man of virile middle age who have 
fought your way from obscurity to inde- 
pendence. You have been self-centered in 
business. You are married. Your wife, still 
retaining, in your eyes, her youth and 
beauty, has been your trusted helpmate 
through all these years. You have loved her 
and have placed implicit confidence in her. 
At the very point when you are able to set 
aside your more weighty business problems 
and to sit back with a sigh of content and 
say, "I have won, and I can now begin to 
enjoy life," you have come home to find that 

47 



your wife, tiring of the long struggle and 
of what she deems inattention on your part, 
has eloped with a man you had considered 
to be your best friend. 

You find that the telephone is cut off. 
You have inadvertently locked yourself in. 
There is no way to get out until morning. 
You are entirely alone in that empty house 
with all its haunting memories, and with 
no human soul in whom you may confide. 
You must pass the long night there with 
no company but your own tumult of 
thoughts. Outside there is nothing but 
darkness. 

Now consider. Lose your own self com- 
pletely. Actually be this man. What are 
your emotions through that night? What 
floods of rage and murderous fury surge 
through you? What softening memories 
come to torment you ? What bewilderments 
overwhelm you as you try to understand 
how this terrible thing could be? What 
self-reproaches come to you? 

There occurs, at some time during that 
night, a crisis, during which your emotions 
crystallize into a definite purpose; and then 

48 



in what desperate mood do you meet the 
dawn? 

We will now say -that you have passed 
through this ordeal. What you have suffered 
would fill pages, yet no one would care to 
read all that you could write about your men- 
tal and moral and physical struggle. What 
you must do is to pick out the salient features 
of that struggle; to give not the detailed 
steps but the impression of that night of 
agony in as few words as possible, so that 
the reader, in passing with you through that 
period of torture, will gain a complete feel' 
ing of your suffering and know just how it 
was, as if he had himself suffered. That ap- 
peal to his sympathy through your own is 
a higher art than the detailed analysis of 
every step in this mental and moral and 
physical cataclysm. The former uses of the 
coldly scientific analysis and the present use 
of the impressionist method in producing 
an emotional effect upon the reader, is one 
of the chief divergences between the old 
school of fiction writing and the modern 
school, and the modern school is vastly bet- 
ter. 

49 



For a test, write your hypothetical expe- 
riences of that night as fully as you like, 
then cut it down exactly one-half. Cut the 
residue down another half, still trying to 
produce the effect of a night of agony, and 
without sacrificing any phase of the episode 
of your mental attitude during it; then see 
how much better and more effective is the 
quarter-length than the full-length compo- 
sition. 

Take other situations which demand sym- 
pathy, and see how you can handle them. 

You are a young woman, attractive, re- 
fined, pure, intelligent, spirited. You have 
been raised, if not in luxury, at least in com- 
fort. You are the oldest child. Your father 
dies, leaving behind him nothing but debts. 
Everything is sold, and you, with your 
mother and two younger sisters, go away 
from the loathed place where suddenly you 
find that you have no friends. The struggle 
for life begins. Your mother is ill, the two 
sisters are too young, and perhaps too deli- 
cate, to work. You try to find employment, 
and in the first place into which you go you 
are met with a coarse insult to your youth 

50 



and your attractiveness and your woman- 
hood. Still you can not give up the strug- 
gle. Your needs force you. There is very 
little at home to eat. There is rent to be 
met. Everything salable has been sold. 
You have positively no recourse. You must 
earn money. You meet with rebuff after 
rebuff and with insult after insult; some- 
times with worse — with kindness which acts 
as a cloak to insult that bides its time and 
opportunity. Put this soul and its torments 
on paper, without melodrama and without 
artificiality, if you can! 

Again, you are a man of below the aver- 
age in education, intelligence, breeding, op- 
portunity, and environment. You have com- 
mitted a crime, perhaps in the heat of pas- 
sion, perhaps as a rash expedient. They are 
hunting you. You are hiding in a dark cor- 
ner in a cellar, half concealed by some rub- 
bish. You hear footsteps coming down the 
stairway. You are desperate. You are 
cowering, with all your muscles tense, ready 
for flight or fight. The gleam of a lantern 
accompanies the steps, and the lantern 
swings closer and closer to your corner. 

5i 



Besides the foremost man, who is carrying 
the lantern, there are three others, all huge 
men, your equals in physique, and they are 
all armed. You have a revolver in your 
hand as you wait. Your heart beats so vig- 
orously that you fear it must be audible. 
The lantern approaches quite closely, then 
it turns, and the men who have been coming 
straight toward you walk away to other 
parts of the dim cellar. They make the 
rounds and return to the bottom of the steps. 
They are about to go up, when the leader 
with the lantern turns back, comes closely 
a little part of the way again toward your 
corner, but finally gives up the search and 
goes upstairs with the other men. 

Of course you can not approve of that 
wretch, even as he cowers there in the cellar, 
with his revolver gripped in his hand so 
hard that it leaves the impress of its every 
marking in his palm, but you must sympa- 
thize with him. Be that man in your sym- 
pathy and write his emotions, then condense 
them to a mere paragraph so that you can 
make your reader, who also can not possibly 

52 



approve of him, feel with him that same hu- 
man sympathy. 

Here have been given three tests of this 
quality in yourself. Write these three, then 
devise seven more situations calling for sym- 
pathetic treatment, and condense them until 
you have conveyed that impression of sym- 
pathetic emotion in the briefest and most 
effective manner of which you are capable. 



S3 



Humor 

A 11 these qualities, creativeness, observa- 
f*\ tion, imagination, democracy, sym- 

^ pathy, must be tempered by humor. 
A sense of humor is the foundation of all \ 
optimism. A sense of humor is the universal 
solvent of human emotion. A sense of hu- 
mor is the touch-stone which renders the 
most puzzling of human problems under- 
standable; but it is also a thing which is 
born and can never be acquired. If you 
have not the gift you might just as well 
never try to obtain it. If you have it count 
yourself blest, but be careful of its use. 
You can make yourself most absurd with a 
lack of discretion in this particular. 

In more serious work the value of humor 
is in the making of contrast. 

Two men in a room confront each other. 
One has a revolver in his hand, the other 
is entirely at his mercy. 

54 



"Quickly !" says the man with the re- 
volver. "Walk across to that window and 
wave your handkerchief, or I shall fire !" 

"Fire, then," says the younger and 
slighter of the two. 

It is a tense moment. They glare into 
each other's eyes, and in neither man is 
there any sign of weakening. Then sud- 
denly a hoarse voice at the window croaks: 

"Fire ! Fire ! O, fireman, save my child !" 

It is a green parrot hanging in a cage. 
In spite of the grave matter at issue be- 
tween them smiles flit across the faces of 
both men. The absurd incongruity of the 
interruption appeals to the sense of humor 
in each one, and for a moment the tension 
is relaxed. The older and darker man is 
the first to strive to regain it. He tries to 
bend his previous inflexible sternness of gaze 
upon his opponent, but the chattering bird, 
once started, keeps up its irrelevant scream- 
ing, and the tension definitely breaks. 

"Come," appeals the younger man, after 
the parrot has quieted down; "let us sit 
here and look at this thing from another 
angle." 

55 



From that point on the situation may 
have a dozen different terminations, a score 
of them, a hundred; but the point has passed 
where any interjected remark by the par- 
rot can have a humorous significance. The 
next one, no matter how irrelevant, would 
have a tragic significance in the story. Im- 
agine the effect if the next absurd phrase 
should be croaked while the younger man 
lay dead ! Part of the absurdity of the orig- 
inal interruption came in its unexpectedness, 
and about humor there is nearly always that 
quality. Its largest value in your own work 
will come about through its unexpected oc- 
currence to you as you proceed with your 
construction. Very few good humorous sit- 
uations are deliberately built. They just 
happen. As for straight humorous writing, 
there is no need to analyze it or even dis- 
cuss it here. Born humorists need no in- 
struction, and the other kind need not try. 



56 



Industry 

I have placed this last for emphasis — the 
ability to work and keep on working, 
even after you think that you have 
passed the limit of endurance. There is no 
permanent success to be achieved in any 
line without work, and particularly is this 
true of authorship. To begin with, assum- 
ing always that you are to make your own 
way from the start — and every worth-while i 
career is so sustained — you will have some 
bread-winning occupation which will leave 
you tired when your drudging hours are 
over. Social attractions will take up some 
of your spare time, and so, right in the 
very beginning, what literary labor you do 
will be performed in hours that are stolen 
from rest and recreation and sleep. This 
reason alone keeps in eighteen-dollar-a- 

57 



week grooves, for a lifetime, many men 
eminently fitted for success in writing. The 
disheartening part is that your first efforts 
will doubtless be unsuccessful; that night 
after night and morning after morning must 
be given up for a year, for two years, for 
three years, possibly, to toil that seems 
fruitless. This does not sound so much of 
a hardship until you try it; until the days 
of discouragement come; until all your ef- 
forts, applauded by your friends, are scorned 
by the only critics worth while — those who 
would actually buy your material and pay 
real money for it. The only course to take 
in such cases is to work! When discour- 
agement comes, work! When you are tired 
out, and sick even of your ambition, work! 
When the temptation comes to slip back 
into the rut, to drift along with the lazy 
tide, rouse yourself and work! I do not 
very much believe in the genius of inspira 
tion. I thoroughly believe in an adaptabil- 
ity and a natural liking for a pursuit, and 
then in work, work, work! Not work by 
fits of sudden enthusiasm, but steady, all- 
the-year-round work! Nothing but work! 

58 



\ 



And that is the royal path to success. Other 
people have said this so often and in so 
many ways that it seems trite and stale, 
but I mean it! I have passed through 
the grind, and I know. C Lay aside idle 
planning and dreaming, and WORK!; 



59 



The Business Story 

Unless you are strong enough to cre- 
ate the fashions, follow them, for 
stories change fashion from year 
to year as markedly as do clothes. As 
you will see, if you keep understandingly 
in touch with the current magazines, the 
story which to-day has precedence over all 
others in popular demand is the business 
story. The same thrill which used to 
characterize stories of adventure, the same 
intensity, the same struggle to win now ap- 
pears just as effectively and picturesquely 
in depicting the commercial and political 
battles of this financial age. If you know 
anything worth telling about the conduct 
of any business, if you have any fertility 
in plot and facility in character-drawing, 
you may combine those requisites in a story 
which will have a better chance of accept- 
ance than any tearful tale of Philip and 

60 



his Chloe. The strategies of finance, high 
and low, frenzied and trapped; the romance 
of millions, and how they were made or 
stolen; the Titanic battles of the kings of 
commerce; the ambitions and struggles and 
final triumphs of the butcher, the baker, and 
candlestick-maker; the daily affairs of the 
"tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary, 
plow-boy, thief," these and their service in 
the cause of the Great God Success are the 
things which interest the live public of to- 
day. 

To write a business story you must know 
intimately of business detail. A knowledge 
of the mere outward detail is scarcely 
enough. You must know not only the mi- 
nute method of procedure in the particular 
line of business which you are handling, but 
you must know the spirit and mental atti- 
tude of the men who conduct that business, 
for in no class of story can you make a more 
absurd failure than in this, if you are not 
thoroughly posted. To write a brokerage 
story and have brokers say that you must 
have worked in a broker's office, to write a 
mercantile story and have merchants say 

61 



you must have worked in a store, to write 
manufacturing stories and have manufac- 
turers say that you must have worked in a 
factory, with knowledge of the inside ma- 
nipulative conditions of each of these, is to 
be successful. Anything else spells failure. 
Experience is necessary in this line. You 
can not invent business conditions, business 
knowledge, or business detail, and without 
much contact with business men, in their 
business life, you are quite likely to misun- 
derstand their attitude and action in busi- 
ness deals. Having the experience, this is 
the most prolific field of all for the modern 
writer, for it covers the subject which the 
large mass of the American public has most 
at heart. Even women to-day read business 
stories with avidity. 

The materials lie everywhere. The story 
of how Hiram Jones bought Ezra Tidball's 
successful Dry Goods and Notions Empo- 
rium at Hick's Mills Cross Roads and made 
a failure of it, or took over the unsuccess- 
ful Emporium and made a success of it, or 
"euchered" Ezra out of it, or was cleverly 
foiled in the attempt, is likely to prove just 

62 



as good fiction material as the consolidation 
of all the railroads in the world. In either 
event there might be a more or less perfunc- 
tory love-story interwoven, and there should 
also be some problem involving business 
honor. Despite the general impression to 
the contrary, among people who talk merely 
for conversation's sake, there is, throughout 
the entire United States, a keen awakening 
of business honor; and this notwithstand- 
ing that business affairs have never been 
so shrewdly conducted. The line between 
business trickery and business cleverness, 
however, is quite sharply drawn, and it is 
at the crossing of this line that the most 
dramatic business stories will be found. 



63 



The Political Story 

Here again absolute knowledge must 
be had, or your stories will be 
both silly and absurd, and people 
who are posted will know it. The news- 
papers are full of political charge and 
counter-charge, and they furnish a wealth 
of material in the way of incident, most 
of it exaggerated, but a great deal of it 
containing much truth. Many of these in- 
cidents are elaborate enough upon which 
to build a thoroughly satisfactory plot, but 
neither incident nor plot are sufficient, no 
matter how complete, without an intimate 
knowledge of the class of men concerned. 
Both the reformer and the grafter are rich 
material, but they must be understood, 
and to understand them they must be 
known. The reformer is easier to compre- 
hend, for his leading motive coincides with 

64 



the code of ethics which we have all been 
taught. He possesses a trace of fanaticism 
which often renders him absurd, but when 
he is free from this absurdity and possesses 
ability he is a clean-cut, vigorous man of 
great dramatic value. The grafter, on the 
other hand, without an intimate acquaint- 
ance with his motives, is well nigh incom- 
prehensible. It must be remembered that 
in most cases he justifies himself, to himself 
at least, for all his acts; that he does not 
imagine himself to be a moral leper; that 
he has both actual and fancied virtues upon 
which he prides himself very highly, and 
that he stoutly contends even to himself, in 
the final analysis, that he is an admirable 
man. 

It does not matter whether you agree 
with him in this estimate or not. It is not 
your province to editorialize in a story. 
You must present the man as he is. If the 
man's purposes and methods must be dis- 
approved, so construct your story that the 
reader will furnish the disapproval. Never 
call your villain a villain. Present his vil- 
lainous act or his villainous speech without 

6 5 



comment and without indignant coloring, 
just as the act presumably happened or the 
speech was presumably spoken, and do not 
overdraw either one. Your audience will 
very quickly decide his character if you have 
drawn him correctly, and they will not thank 
you for having left them no room for the ex- 
ercise of their own intelligence. For the 
same reason it is not wise to call your hero 
noble upon every page, nor your humorous 
character funny, nor your disagreeable 
woman sour. 

Material for political stories will be found 
everywhere, from the rural district to the 
city, from ward to national politics, and if 
well drawn they are always interesting and 
always salable. Experience, again it must 
be insisted upon, is absolutely requisite, 
however, in the handling of these stories, 
and without that intimate knowledge they 
had best be let severely alone. 



66 



The Detective Story 

One enters the realms of fancy, now, 
and more latitude for divergence 
from truth is permitted here by 
custom than in the two classes of stories 
above named. It is quite likely that the 
true detective story has not yet been writ- 
ten. Nearly all of them which have found 
vogue are most radical distortions, and ap- 
peal to the reader not from their proba- 
bility, but from their ingenuity. Sherlock 
Holmes, to cite an instance, is a purely 
imaginative creature, the like of whom has 
never existed, and probably never will exist, 
and he is as far from the truth as those di- 
verting thieves, Raffles and Arsene Lupin. 
Exaggerated character drawings, however, 
are, by custom, allowable throughout in sto- 
ries of this kind, and they are even recom- 
mended as heightening the color. 

These and all other mystery stories are 

6 7 



almost necessarily written backwards; that 
is, the solution of the puzzling situation 
must be known in advance by the writer, and 
the developments which lead up to the solu- 
tion carefully worked out, so that conceal- 
ment is maintained until the very end. If 
the writer begins with a mystery unsolvable 
to himself, and constructs a story about this, 
finally working out a solution, he is furnish- 
ing the intelligence of his reader with the 
same basis for deduction as himself, and his 
denouement will be anticipated. On the 
other hand, if the creation of the story is 
started with the solution fixed firmly in 
mind, it is possible to bafHe the reader from 
beginning to end, while still holding his 
piqued interest and attention, which is fully 
as essential as endless ingenuity of plot. 

There is an excellent market for this type 
of story if it is cleverly written, and no very 
deep knowledge of criminology seems re- 
quisite, to judge from certain commercially 
successful examples, although a mastery of 
criminal court proceedings and police rou- 
tine should be had. At least two women 
have been quite facile in this line, but in the 

68 



work of both of them the lack of knowledge 
of criminal character is conspicuous, and 
makes their creations of necessity ephem- 
eral. More accurate knowledge might 
give them a more permanent value. Perma- 
nent fame, however, is reserved for the 
writer — and he will almost of necessity be a 
man, since only a man can have a properly 
intimate acquaintance with his types — who 
will pen the story of actual modern detective 
work, filled with brilliant character draw- 
ings of criminals as they actually are and 
detectives as they really exist, and with plot 
and incident as they might with exact prob- 
ability occur. These will be brutal stories 
and sordid, but they will be full of fighting 
and red blood and virility and thrilling situa- 
tions and dramatic climaxes. There will not 
be in them so much keen mental deduction 
as there will be physical supremacy, and 
once they have their vogue established, they 
will command a high price. Truth always 
does. 



69 



Stories for Children 

There is nothing so difficult to write, 
and which pays so little in mone- 
tary returns, considering the amount 
of labor and talent required, as stories 
for children. The gift of writing them 
acceptably is a very rare one, and people 
are more often mistaken in their ability 
in this line than in any other. It seems 
a simple thing to do, but it is not. In 
the first place, few people understand the 
processes of a child's mind, and in the en- 
deavor to write down to their comprehen- 
sion insult their intelligence. So many 
people forget, or never seem to have com- 
prehended, that children, in mental fiber, in 
observation, in comprehension, and in rea- 
soning power, are precisely like their el- 
ders, with the sole exception of lacking ex- 
perience upon which to base their deduc- 
tions. Most of the attempts to appeal to 

70 



the intelligence of children are utterly silly. 
There is nothing truer than that men are 
but children of a larger growth, but the con- 
verse is equally true. A few writers have 
realized this, and have appealed, soberly 
and with splendid success, directly to the 
child intelligence as if it were grown up, 
being only careful to use an easy range of 
vocabulary, ideas which can come within 
the range of child experience, and plot and 
incident which are free from the need of 
maturity. Love, for instance, may be be- 
tween the sexes, but must be absolutely 
sexless. 

An immoral lesson or an immoral deduc- 
tion must, of course, never be possible, but 
neither is it necessary to try, in every page, 
to cram a moral preachment down the 
throats of poor, badgered infants, who must 
listen,, every day of their lives, to wearisome 
sermons from some one or the other of 
many misguided acquaintances. If you had 
to endure, throughout every revolution of 
the earth upon its axis, to have some three 
or four people solemnly warn you to be 
good, you would become tired, by and by, 

7i 



of being naturally good because you were 
born that way and because your natural in- 
stincts set in that direction, and be tempted, 
merely out of self-assertiveness, to be bad. 
It is quite possible to convey good moral 
lessons without being so infernally obvious 
about it. Happily the spasm is passing in 
which it was considered immoral to tell 
children fairy stories. Their imaginations 
are fully as keen as ours, and need food just 
as their bodies do, and it is most comfort- 
ing to run across a tale now and then which 
is meant merely to amuse them and to en- 
gage their fancies. About once in a gener- 
ation a Frank L. Baum arises to bless the 
children, and is richly rewarded, but, like 
the writer of humor, he is born, not made. 
If you have inclinations in that direction, 
you might try. You can never know 
whether or not you have a gift until you put 
it to the test. 

The writing of stories for the very young 
has, however, one very valuable feature for 
all beginners. Several writers whom I know 
had their earliest literary practice upon the 
writing of children's stories, and were com- 

72 



pelled thereby to seek simplicity of lan- 
guage. It becomes necessary to use as 
many words of one syllable as possible, 
never to use a three-syllable word where a 
two-syllable word will do, and never to use 
a word of more than three syllables at all. 
It would seem at the first glance that this 
would hamper expression. On the contrary, 
it is a vast aid to it. Let us examine a 
sample paragraph. 

"At the close of day the man stood on the 
top of the hill, a black blot against the red 
rim of the sun. The cold wind of the night 
blew upon him from out the icy north. 
Looking down on the far-off city which he 
had just left for all time, he hid his face in 
his hands and sobbed." 

You will find, upon glancing over these 
sentences, which are taken from no story 
whatever, but which might well serve as the 
introduction to one, that out of sixty-two 
words, all but six consist of one syllable, 
while the six exceptions are extremely 
simple words; yet I do not believe that any 
more vivid picture could be constructed 
with all the polysyllabled Latin derivatives 

73 



in the world. I would not counsel any one 
to attempt to found his style upon Addison 
or Steele or any other writer living or dead, 
but I would counsel long and painstaking 
practice in the art of writing in simple 
words. You are compelled by this to di- 
rectness of speech and clearness of idea. 
You are bound to gain force by it. If you 
have thoroughly grounded yourself in this 
practice, you need the style of no other man 
from which to copy. Afterwards you may 
take liberties with your self-imposed restric- 
tions ; may allow yourself as wide a choice as 
you like, but always those fundamentals of 
directness and clarity will be the basis of 
your work, and you can not go far wrong. 
For this reason I would commend the writ- 
ing of stories for young children. If you 
can secure the opportunity to edit or write 
a child's page for some newspaper for a 
year or two, take it at any price. Your gain 
in simplicity of expression will be worth an 
incalculable price to you in after years, if 
you take up writing as a permanent profes- 
sion. 

As has been pointed out, this is not a 
74 



paying branch. Commercial reasons are be- 
hind this. Most of the children's pages in 
the newspapers are supplied by syndicates 
which provide the entire pages, including 
the illustrations, very cheaply, sometimes 
for as low as three dollars a week, furnish- 
ing the same material to a great many pa- 
pers. They do not pay high prices to their 
writers because there are so many of them, 
girls and beginners who do not expect much 
for their labor. There are but very few 
children's magazines, and these are unable 
to pay large prices because they find it im- 
possible to secure much advertising for their 
pages. Children are not buyers of merchan- 
dise to any large extent, and the older peo- 
ple, as a rule, see their advertisements in 
other places. 

So far we have discussed only stories for 
the very young, but magazine and Sunday 
newspaper stories for youths of from twelve 
to eighteen do not offer a much better mar- 
ket, the same reasons prevailing. Stories of 
this type for book publication, however, are 
more worth while from a monetary stand- 
point, as witness the books of Henty, Louisa 

75 



M. Alcott, and others. Such books are usu- 
ally written in series, and comprise, for boys, 
tales of clean adventure in which the manly 
qualities of courage and honesty have a 
prominent part; and for girls, home or 
school stories in which the counter-balanc- 
ing feminine virtues have an equally impor- 
tant place. In both of these the action must 
be constant, for the minds of the young are 
eager and restless as much so as their 
bodies, and require constant change. 

While very exceptional talent in this line 
will reap a satisfactory commercial reward, 
the same amount of effort and ability, if 
spent upon general fiction, will pay much 
better. It will not be for you to choose, 
however. You will discover, eventually, 
that you can write some things much bet- 
ter than others. When you find that branch 
of work, unless you are one gifted with a 
universality of genius, stick to it and de- 
velop it to your highest power, and at the 
same time develop your market. Concen- 
tration here, as in every other line of busi- 
ness in the world, will achieve a most com- 
fortable and satisfying success. 

7 6 



Stories About Children 

Stories about children, for "grown- 
ups" to read, fall into an entirely 
different class from those above, and 
for these stories, well written, there is al- 
ways a most eager demand. Josephine 
Dodge Daskam, George Madden Martin, 
Myra Kelly, and others, have attained 
both fame and competence in this line, 
and the fundamental feature of their work 
has been that it is true to all childhood. 
They have penetrated and understood the 
minds and hearts of children, not to ap- 
peal to them, but to appeal to others who 
know and understand. Almost any bright 
child may form the basis of such portrai- 
ture. It must be borne in mind, how- 
ever, that here, as in all other classes of 
fiction-writing, stories do not come to your 
hand ready-made. They are imperfect, as 
you find them in real life, and your observa- 

77 



tion and experience can only give you the 
germ of the stories and the character-draw- 
ing. The stories themselves must be devel- 
oped from the material you find, and the 
same rules which apply to other story con- 
struction apply here. There must be a be- 
ginning, a purpose, and a climax. 



78 






Stories of Adventure 

This is a class of story which will 
never die, and its range is as wide 
as the globe itself. Even in the 
meekest and the mildest of us there ex- 
ists at least the rudiments of a desire to 
wander forth into the unknown, to do 
battle, and to conquer, and if we can not 
do this in the tender flesh, we insist upon 
doing it in the hardy imagination. Good, 
stirring stories of adventure excite and 
still satisfy the wanderlust of most of us. 
No hard and fast rule can be laid down 
for this class of story, for it is of end- 
less variety. Wherever circumstance or en- 
vironment may be devised that fearless 
men may venture into danger and peerless 
women may be rescued, there will be found 
the materials, and truth may put the cover 
upon her well and rest a while. Only be 

79 



careful that one thrill treads sharply upon 
the heels of another, that your heroine be 
as good as she is beautiful, your hero with- 
out a trace of fear, and your villain remorse- 
lessly blood-thirsty, and you may wander at 
will in the realms of your fancy to devise 
enough violent deeds for them to do. The 
locale may be in a city, a village, or a forest; 
on sea, in a mine, or in an airship; at the 
equator or the north pole, in Japan or Africa 
or America, in the past, the present, or the 
future, or in all of these, bearing always in 
mind, above everything, that you must have 
swift and continuous action and high moral 
purpose; for there is nothing cleaner in all 
the realms of literary composition than the 
morals of your slashing melodrama. To 
that writer who can devise a new setting for 
the old elements of adventure stories there 
awaits laurels of gold which can be coined 
into abundant dollars. 



80 



The Love-Story 

In no line of fiction is the tremendous 
change in public taste shown more 
than in what is known as the straight 
love-story. In the old type love was a 
strange, abstract sort of creation with every 
hint of sex carefully eliminated, though 
it was the be all and end all of the 
living world. Impossible men wooed im- 
possible maidens through long chapters 
devoted for the most part to poetic de- 
scription. An entire page was given up to 
describing the sunny day in June in which 
the story opened, and the remaining pages 
told how the birds flitted in the trees and 
the butterflies hovered over the flowers; 
how the breezes, straying from far-off mead- 
ows and laden with the fragrance of new- 
mown hay, stirred gently the locks of the 
fair-haired maiden in the garden plucking 

81 



roses. End of first chapter. Chapter two 
was devoted entirely to a description of the 
fair-haired maiden; her lips, her eyes, her 
alabaster brow, and every part of her vis- 
ible perfections were carefully catalogued 
and indexed until, at the close of the chap- 
ter, He, astride a prancing charger, dis- 
mounted at the gate. He was sometimes 
rich and sometimes poor, but necessarily 
honest. There was a rich and necessarily 
dishonest man, considerably older and in- 
variably of a dark complexion, who wanted 
to marry her, and who was favored by her 
parents. Need we say, dear reader, that 
after much trial and tribulation and heart- 
breaking sorrow and sickness-unto-death, 
the rich but dishonest man was proved a 
villain and she married Him ? Last of all, 
after the story was all over, there was a de- 
scription of the bridal garments and the 
name of the hymn which was played as they 
walked up the aisle of the church, in full 
view, as they passed the window, of the vil- 
lain's shining tombstone. About the only di- 
vergence ever permissible in this class of 
stories was in the names of the characters. 

82 



Plot, incident, and character-drawing were 
almost identical. 

The modern straight love-story scarcely 
exists, but love is still with us, as potent as 
it was when it first rolled forth from chaos, 
and in a story its presence is nearly always 
necessary. In most cases, however, it is 
only elementary and incidental, being ad- 
mitted as a leading motive, but giving way 
in interest of detail to the absorbing action 
which grows out of it or revolves about it. 
Men are ready to do battle and to die for love 
just as promptly as ever, if need be, but the 
condition is recognized in its truer relation 
to life. Nearly always the love-story of to- 
day is written with a frank recognition, 
though by no means always expressed, of 
the sex relation. It is taken for granted 
that two given persons are more in har- 
mony with each other psychologically, phys- 
iologically, mentally, and spiritually than 
either of these same two persons would be 
with any other person. In this attitude 
there has been no change since civilization 
recognized the right of a woman to mutual 
choice, but, nevertheless, love as the lead- 

83 



ing incident of a story has been well nigh 
discarded. It becomes the motive, mostly 
A in the background, upon which all other in- 
cidents are hinged and to which they refer. 
The explanation is very simple, though the 
principles have not changed. Men do not 
neglect their business because they are in 
love, but they succeed in it to prove to the 
woman of their choice their prowess and 
so to win her admiration, precisely as the 
knights of old used to go out before break- 
fast and kill an enemy or so, to lay the cap- 
tured arms and accoutrement at the feet of 
their ladies; only business does not seem so 
romantic as righting, and it takes more space 
and prominence to arouse interest. 

The girl of the modern story is as differ- 
ent from the girl of the early story as a 
modern girl is different from the early girl, 
or, in fact, as modern times are different 
from early times. She is healthy of mind 
and body. She is not innocent in the old- 
time sense of being ignorant, and above all 
she is independent, all facts which have been 
so many death-blows to the old-time twad- 
dler. The girl in the old-time love-story was 

84 



exaggerated from the models that the writer 
saw around him, and carried to the Nth 
degree of what he thought a clinging vine 
ought to be like. Women read these stories 
and sighed and wept over them, and what 
influence they had upon heredity, heaven 
only knows. Happily we have outgrown 
them. The girls in the stories of to-day are 
drawn, as are all other characters and inci- 
dents, from actual life, idealized but slightly, 
and they have infinitely more naturalness; 
and charm and winsomeness. 

This branch of the work is so persistently 
dwelt upon here because, with the very 
young and consequently with every amateur, 
the love-story, as a rule, f ollows immediately 
upon those early attempts at poetry in which 
every line is very carefully begun with a 
capital letter and in which the last word of 
each second and fourth line is most painstak- 
ingly rhymed. When we come to have a 
dim perception that perhaps Tennyson, 
through some intangible reason or other, 
had a trifle the advantage of us, we turn to 
prose, and what more natural than the tran- 
sition to poetic prose? It is the springtime 

85 



of life with us, when birds twitter and flow- 
ers bloom and morning skies blush red, and 
all because love is in the world. Perhaps 
those strangely stilted creatures who did 
nothing all day long but fall in love and stay 
in love from preface to finis, who talked love 
and plotted love, dreamed love and thought 
love, and all but ate and drank it through 
the pages of the long since forgotten Godey's 
Ladies' Magazine, owed their being to the 
fact that American literature itself was then 
quite young. To-day, in the dawning ma* 
turity of Western letters, all is changed. 
Once in a decade, perhaps, there is pub- 
lished a strong and worth-while tale of love 
which wades seas and scales mountains, but 
for the most part this vast main-spring of 
human motive and action is crowded into its 
case with the other cogs and pinion wheels 
that go to make up the general largeness of 
life. 

To tell the truth, editors do not particu- 
larly care for love-stories, especially of the 
variety that is likely to be turned out by the 
young. They know, and writers who have 
trod the thorny path which leads to suc- 

86 



cess know, that this sort of tale is the most 
difficult of all to write, and that the happy 
medium between the mawkish sentimental- 
ity of puppy love and the perfectly frigid at- 
titude of those who marry because two can 
live cheaper than one, is most difficult to 
obtain. It is better by far to leave love- 
stories alone, unless one happens to have a 
special gift for them. In that case no con- 
trary advice will hurt, because the gifted one 
will pay no attention to it, but "will follow 
his natural bent, even as you and I." 

The obvious stories, based upon the ev- 
ery-day comedy and tragedy about you, with 
love perhaps as a background motive, al- 
low me to repeat, are better. Some day, 
when maturity comes, when you can study 
this great emotion and passion in its true 
relations, when you have attained facility 
as a writer, you may perhaps write the great 
love-story, but until then practice upon 
something you can comprehend. 



87 



The Historical Story 

This is the sugar, or salt, or other 
staple commodity, of the story- 
telling and story-selling trade. It 
is dear to our souls, it warms the cockles 
of our hearts, this swash-buckling old friend 
of ours. Occasionally the writers of his- 
torical stories spend much time and re- 
search to rehabilitate a by-gone period, to 
reproduce it in all the finery and charm 
that perspective lends it, and to make it 
an accurate picture of the past, but with all 
their labor it becomes, in fact, merely but 
a background upon which to hang stirring 
romance and adventure, and what was said 
in relation to stories of adventure conse- 
quently applies here. There is no question 
that the historical setting gives to such sto- 
ries the enhancement of color, but if at- 
tempted they should be as near historically 
accurate as patient research can make them. 
A few mere "gadzooks" and "godswounds" 

88 



will not take the place of this care in mak- 
ing anything like permanent success. For 
the balance the same rule applies to the con- 
struction of these stories as to the construc- 
tion of all others. They must have a cen- 
tral theme, carried out to a logical conclu- 
sion, and the character-drawing must be 
true, not necessarily to the period so much 
as to all humanity, its motives and its emo- 
tions, its aims and ambitions, and its striv- 
ings for a higher level. For myself, the writ- 
ing of a historical story does not attract me. 
I prefer the incidents and the people whom 
I find dwelling near me, whom I meet in 
clubs and hotels and in the parlors of my 
friends, whom I see upon the streets of my 
own city, on railway trains, and in distant 
places, and it seems to me that if one can 
write truthfully and well of these familiar 
things, if he can reflect with fidelity the ani- 
mating spirit, the customs, and the every- 
day life of his own time, he will be writing 
the true historical story; that is, the story 
which in the future shall be regarded as of 
value and interest for its historical fidelity, 
in addition to its interest as an episode in 
the never-ending drama of the human soul. 

89 



Dialect Stories 

Whatever else you do, be careful 
of dialect. Mere "freak" spell- 
ing by no means makes dia- 
lect, which is the easiest of all things to 
overdo. It should only be used where ab- 
solutely necessary, and then with the ut- 
most caution. Every phonetically spelled 
word which deviates from the normal 
should be said aloud and listened to with 
a trained ear, to make sure that it repre- 
sents exactly the required sound. Discard 
nearly all of the conventionally misspelled 
and frequently used words which have come 
to represent Irish, German, Hebrew, Negro, 
and other racial speeches. In the ordinary 
"comic dialect," in nine cases out of ten, 
these are more or less absurd exaggerations. 
Unless you are thoroughly familiar with Ne- 
gro character and have been in close and 

90 



intimate enough contact with these half 
childlike, half savage people to know per- 
fectly their modes of speech — and thought 
— do not, in the name of all consistency and 
logic and sanity, attempt to write Negro 
dialect. The same applies to all other like 
cases. Dialect is seldom necessary to the 
sustainment of the human interest of a 
story, and the color it adds is better left out 
unless it is well done. 

Where one succeeds in dialect work, a 
thousand fail. It requires a very musical 
ear to detect and analyze the variation in the 
pronunciation of words which makes dialect, 
and it requires an intimate knowledge of 
every living and thinking habit of the race 
or district under consideration to know the 
characteristic words in use; and this, after 
all, is not only the live spirit of dialect, but 
its main divergence, even more important 
than mere differences of pronunciation. Un- 
less you are sure that you can do these things 
in absolute perfection, let them entirely 
alone and turn your attention to something 
else. 



9i 



Stories Not to be Written 

A void, by all means, the morbid and 
ILl the gruesome. There is no de- 
■*■ ^ mand for them. It is doubtful if 
Poe could to-day place in a good, well- 
paying market his marvelous stories. As a 
nation we want and demand cheerfulness. 
Last, but not least, avoid the salacious and 
the impure as you would poison. Aside 
from the moral aspect, there is no money in 
this sort of writing, notwithstanding the tre- 
mendous success of "Three Weeks," which 
at the time of penning this treatise is the 
latest notable putrescence to assail the nos- 
trils of the reading public. Where one story 
of this sort succeeds, innumberable others 
fail, and justly so. After all we are a whole- 
some people; perhaps none more so in the 
world. Moreover, while a success of this 
sort might be possible in a book, in a mag- 
azine it is entirely out of the question. No 
magazine which will pay worth-while prices 

92 



will purchase stories of this type. Let them 
alone entirely. Do not allow yourself to 
run away with the idea that they are artistic. 
The most artistic things in the world are 
the cleanest. The time has gone by when 
it was considered »that artists, musical com- 
posers, and authors must necessarily be of 
unclean lives or of unclean thought. The 
most successful artists in every line to-day, 
and those the artistic excellence of whose 
work most deserves success, are the cleanest 
of habit and of mind, and if you want to 
court professional failure and personal mis- 
ery, try deviation from the wholesome prin- 
ciples of right living and right thinking 
taught in the Bible or in any other code of 
ethics upon which a great and permanent re- 
ligion has been founded. I speak this not as 
one who would preach, but as a practical 
man who has seen nearly all modes of life, 
and whose judgment, which he feels to be 
not entirely an unripe one, has picked out 
positively the best; and remember that, no 
matter how painstakingly you try to dis- 
guise it, your true self will show through 
your writing. 

93 



Construction 

A short story can not attempt to take 
in the entire scope of a novel, nor 
could any good novel be shorn of 
its extraneous matter and condensed into 
the compass of a short story. A novel 
may comprise in its pages the detailed 
history of a lifetime, the growth and dis- 
integration of a nation, the improvement 
or retrogression of a world. The short 
story must be confined to a single inci- 
dent. A short story should be to the 
novel what a song is to an opera. Some- 
times the song may be better than the wliole 
balance of the opera which contained it, and 
may be remembered longer. A novel may 
be roughly compared to a landscape paint- 
ing in which a beautiful tree is the most im- 
portant figure, and the short story would, 
following the analogy, be a painting of the 
tree itself. The whole import of the book 

94 



"Ben Hur" could not be compressed into the 
limits of a short story, but the chariot race 
of Ben Hur, with some trifling work to re- 
model the rough edges where it has been 
torn from its setting, would make a magnifi- 
cent short story. Get this difference fixed 
clearly in your mind before you attempt to 
write. You must have one clearly defined 
episode about which everything must cen- 
ter. The plot may be as elaborate as you 
like, but never for one moment may you for- 
get that it must all revolve about or lead 
up to a single climax. Miner episodes, it is 
true, it may have in plenty, but these must 
never be used unless they are illustrative of 
or contributory to the main episode. 

It is only within the last two or three 
decades that this really new phase of liter- 
ary accomplishment has developed to its 
present pre-eminence. The short story in 
its modern development is an entirely dis- 
tinct creation, differing as much from the 
early efforts of Boccaccio and his ilk as the 
verse of Kipling differs from the epics of 
Homer. There is no ground of comparison 
because they are of an entirely different 

05 



genus. It is as H. H. Wells put it, when 
asked to decide which he thought the bet- 
ter of two excellent but entirely dissimilar 
stories. 

"It is absurd," he said. "It is like asking 
me which I like the better; butter or but- 
tercups." 

The early short story was the narration 
of a mere passing incident, the event of a 
day or a night. It was only the part of a 
story. The modern short story has a be- 
ginning, a purpose, and a climax. It com- 
prises within its brief expanse clean, clear 
character-drawing, and may, like the novel, 
cover the entire career and purpose of a life- 
time, but, unlike the novel, it must convey 
the impression of this lifetime through the 
illustrative episode which forms the entire 
backbone of the story. The modern devel- 
opment has action, description, and logical 
construction, and all the elements which 
used to make the successful old-fashioned 
novel, but made tense and terse by the elimi- 
nation of all but one illuminative climax. 

In your early practice skeletonize your 
story. Think it over well and shear of all 

96 



its extraneous and contributory phases the 
dramatic or other episode which is to be 
your climax. Express this on paper in as 
few terse words as possible. Add to this, 
then, in brief, separate sentences the epi- 
sodes which are to lead up to your climax. 
When you have a clear and definite under- 
standing of what you are about to do, se- 
lect the names of your characters and their 
scenic environment and invest them in your 
own mind with a living, breathing person- 
ality. Then start your story. If you invest 
your characters with this personality before 
you have studied well the construction, the 
people whom you have created will take the 
bit in their teeth, will run away with your 
story, and destroy your theme. Inciden- 
tally they may make a better story out of it 
than you would have done, but this will 
scarcely happen in your earlier efforts. 



97 



The Beginning 

Having selected your story and being 
quite sure that you have a story to 
tell, proceed as an old newspaper 
man once told me was the proper way to 
write news items. Begin in the middle, and 
write both ways. By that it is meant that 
you must make some almost startlingly in- 
teresting statement at the beginning of 
your story. Make your first page, your 
first paragraph, your first sentence, your 
first words, if possible, so absorbing that 
they will force the attention of the reader, 
and carry it through to the end of what 
you have to say. The trick is compara- 
tively simple. Do not write an introduc- 
tion. 

By way of illustration I am going to pre- 
sent the beginning of a half dozen of my 
own stories. It might have been more mod- 
est to select those of other writers, to give 
you examples from Poe and Hawthorne, 

98 



from Flaubert and De Maupassant, from 
O. Henry and Robert W. Chambers, but, 
after all, I am much more familiar with 
my own work, and it follows, too, as nearly 
as I can make it, the principles in which I 
firmly believe. 

To begin with, here follow the first three 
hundred and eighty-nine words of the man- 
uscript of "Selling a Patent," one of a se- 
ries of the adventures of one J. Rufus Wal- 
lingford which were first published in the 
"Saturday Evening Post" and afterwards 
incorporated into a book under the title of 
"Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford:" 

A fussy little German, in very 
new looking clothes which fitted 
him almost like tailor-made, rushed 
back to the gates of the train-shed, 
where the conductor stood with his 
eyes fixed intensely upon his watch, 
his left hand poised ready to wave. 
"I left my umbrella," spluttered 
the passenger. 

"No time," declared the autocrat, 
not gruffly or unkindly, but in a 
tone of virtuous devotion to duty. 
99 



The little German's eyes glared 
through his spectacles, his face 
puffed red, his gray mustache bris- 
tled. 

"But it's my wife's umbrella!" 
he urged, as if that might make a 
difference. 

The brass-buttoned slave to duty 
did not even smile. He raised his 
hand, and in a moment more the 
potent turn of his wrist would have 
sent Number Eighteen plunging on 
her westward way. In that mo- 
ment, however, the Pullman con- 
ductor, waiting with him, clutched 
the blue arm of authority. 

"Hold her a second," he advised, 
with his thumb pointed far up the 
platform. "Here comes from a dol- 
lar up for everybody. He 's rode 
with me before." 

The captain of Eighteen gave a 
swift glance and was satisfied. 

"Sure. I know him," he said of 
the newcomer, then he turned to 
the still desperately hopeful passen- 
ioo 



ger and relented. "Run!" he di- 
rected briefly. 

The gentleman who has secured 
for Carl Klug this boon, merely by 
an opportune arrival, was not hur- 
rying. He was too large a man to 
hurry, so a depot porter was doing 
it for him. The porter plunged on 
in advance, springing heavily from 
one bent leg to the other, weighted 
down with a hat box in one hand, 
a huge Gladstone bag in the other, 
and a suit case under each arm. 
The perspiration was streaming 
down his face, but he was quite con- 
tent. Behind him stalked J. Rufus 
Wallingford, carrying only a cane 
and gloves; but more, for him, 
would have seemed absurd, for 
when he moved the background 
seemed to advance with him, he 
was so broad of shoulder and of 
chest and of mid-girth. Dignity ra- 
diated from his frame and carriage, 
good humor from his big face, 
wealth from every line and crease 
101 



of his garments, and it was no mat- 
ter for wonder that even the rigid 
schedule of Number Eighteen was 
glad to extend to this master of cir- 
cumstances its small fraction of 
elasticity. 

In this space, which was the beginning 
of a story running to the unusually cum- 
bersome length of twenty thousand words, 
five clearly defined character portraits are 
suggested: the German passenger, a train 
conductor, a Pullman conductor, a depot 
porter, and J. Rufus Wallingford, who is 
the central figure of the story. The Ger- 
man is the man whom Wallingford pro- 
ceeds to rob of his patent on a sales-re- 
cording device; but three of the characters 
— the train crew — never appear again; and 
while these are graphically enough pic- 
tured, close analysis will show that they are 
not as carefully drawn as the two leading 
characters. They are only described as to 
the general characteristics of conductors and 
porters, being left indefinite as to facial and 
bodily characteristics so that the reader may 
form his own pictures of them. To have 

102 



described them more accurately would have 
been to have fixed them too firmly in the 
minds of readers; they would then have re- 
mained in the memory and have excited a 
lingering wonder as to when they would ap- 
pear again. 

In this beginning action is started at 
once. The picture is one that has life and 
motion. Moreover, the background is one 
with which nearly all people are familiar. 
There is a hint, too, that the man Walling- 
f ord is a "smooth" individual, and not overly 
scrupulous. 

Let us go over the first paragraph again: 

A fussy little German, in very 
new looking clothes which fitted 
him almost like tailor-made, rushed 
back to the gates of the train-shed, 
where the conductor stood with his 
eyes fixed intently on his watch, his 
left hand poised ready to wave. 

At the very outset and within a few 
words two characters and immediate action 
are introduced, and the reader is interested 
at once, if he is going to be interested at all. 

103 



The next example is the beginning of a 
story called "Skeezicks," published in "Mc- 
Clure's Magazine :" 

"Does Master Charles Edward 
Freeman, Esquire, live here?" po- 
litely asked Uncle Joe, pausing in 
mock hesitation. 

The small boy on the gate-post, 
who had been idly drumming his 
heels against the smooth wood, at 
once checked back his smile of 
greeting, ready for any amount of 
serious pretense. 

"Yes, sir," he answered, with 
equally grave courtesy. 

"And is the gentleman at home?" 
Uncle Joe was anxious to know. 

"No, sir," replied the boy, not 
even the suspicion of twinkle in his 
inscrutable eyes. 

"No?" inquired the young man 
in surprise. "It 's really too bad 
that he is away, for I wished to 
see him on rather particular busi- 
ness not unconnected with choco- 
late creams. Please tell him that 
104 



I called, will you?" And Uncle Joe 
slowly moved on. 

That broke the combination. 

"Uncle Joe!" cried an eager 
voice, childish this time and quite 
unlike the one that had been used 
up to this point. "Come back, 
Uncle Joe ! I 'm Charles Edward 
Freeman, but really and truly I 'm 
not at home, you know, because 
I 'm right here on the gate-post." 
This with a gleeful laugh. 

Uncle Joe returned, but uncon- 
vinced. 

"You do n't mean to claim that 
you are Master Charles Edward 
Freeman, Esquire, do you?" he de- 
manded. 

"Yes, sir." The boy was again 
gravity itself. 

"Nonsense ! Why, it 's quite im- 
possible. Charles Edward Free- 
man is a regular six-foot-two name, 
with a plug hat and a cane and 
other trimmings. I 'm certain 
you 're not six foot two. Jump 
105 



down here and let me measure 
you." 
The entire whimsical nature of what is 
to follow is foreshadowed in these para- 
graphs, and two of the three main charac- 
ters are introduced at once. 

The next example is from "The Strike 
Breaker," also published in "McClure's:" 
Young Tremont paused to light 
a cigar, but, as he did so, he cast 
a quick glance down the dark alley 
opposite which he stood. It was 
just as well to be cautious. At first 
the alley- way seemed empty, but as 
the match flared up and the end of 
his Havana caught the fire, a rough 
figure came from behind the big 
telephone pole. Instantly Tremont 
dropped his hands into his overcoat 
pockets. As the figure came to- 

m 

ward him, the muzzles of two con- 
cealed hammerless pistols were 
pointing straight at it, a cool finger 
on each trigger. 
Again, in the first paragraph, a back- 
ground picture, a hint of character-drawing, 
106 



and action, always action. In this, too, ob- 
serve that in very few words the reader is 
given a distinct imagery of the surround- 
ings. Read it over and you will see that 
there is no description whatever. There is 
a mere mention of a dark alley mouth with 
a telephone pole in it, and yet I venture to 
say that after the reading of that paragraph 
you had a vivid mental picture of the entire 
scene. The point is that only the impres- 
sion of the scene was given and you supplied 
all the missing details from your own imag- 
ination and your own memory of such lo- 
calities. 

Below is the first paragraph of "Move 
On," a story published in "Munsey's-:" 
Along about midnight, a man 
with his head bent and his shoul- 
ders huddled against the biting 
cold, turned from the railroad track 
and limped painfully back to the 
brickyard, where the smoke from 
thick, squat chimneys glowed red 
and promised warmth. As he en- 
tered the lane of sheds he saw a 
lantern come swinging up from the 
107 



other end, and hid himself in the 
shadow of a pile of clay-hung lum- 
ber. The watchman stalked by, 
whistling cheerfully. Out of the 
corner of his eye he saw the va- 
grant as the gleam of the lantern 
flashed upon him, but he paid no 
attention; he did not want to see 
the man. He was a big, bluff, 
hearty fellow who had known cold 
nights himself. 

Here is the same principle; to begin pre- 
cisely as if the reader were familiar with all 
the preceding circumstances, to leave out all 
the uninteresting details, and to proceed at 
once with the groundwork of the story. In 
other words, your characters are introduced 
at a moment when they are already in ac- 
tion, and the story is under way at the mo- 
ment you meet them. 

Next follows the beginning of "Fanchon 
The Lobster," published in the "Saturday 
Evening Post," a story of entirely different 
type from any of the others, but introducing 
the two leading characters, Pierre Piquard 

108 



and the remarkable lobster, and both in 
action: 

Oh, it was an admirable lobster! 
Excellent! Per-fect! Pierre Pi- 
quard gesticulated with joy, both 
plump, white hands clasped before 
his throat, even while Francois ges- 
ticulated with pain. There had 
been other lobsters which had ar- 
rived sturdily protesting after their 
long and tiresome journey from the 
east, but none with the tremendous 
vitality — and spirit! — of this one. 
The moment Francois, used to the 
feeble and sluggish movements of 
the creatures, had thrust down his 
hand, there came a swift move- 
ment and click, and behold, from 
one lean finger of the dancing Fran- 
cois dangled the entire weight of 
the beast! 

The beginning of "The Making of Bobby 
Burnit," published as a series of stories in 
the "Saturday Evening Post," afterwards as 
a connected book, and then turned into a 

109 



play, is slightly different because it intro- 
duces a character who, though one of the 
leading personages in the "cast," is dead be- 
fore the story begins. It is attempted in 
this, however, to present an interesting and 
unusual situation in the very first paragraph, 
and the manner in which "Bobby" has been 
accepted by the public would lead to the be- 
lief that this was accomplished. 

"I am profoundly convinced that 
my son is a fool," read the will of 
old John Burnit. "I am, however, 
also convinced that I allowed him 
to become so, by too much absorp- 
tion in my own affairs and too lit- 
tle in his, and, therefore, his being 
a fool is hereditary; consequently 
I feel it my duty, first : to give him 
a fair trial at making his own way, 
and second: to place the balance of 
my fortune in such trust that he 
can not starve. The trusteeship is 
already created and the details are 
nobody's present business. My son 
Robert will take over The John 
Burnit Store and personally con- 
no 



duct it, as his only resource, with- 
out further question as to what else 
I may have left behind me. This 
is my last will and testament." 

That is how cheerful Bobby Bur- 
nit, with no thought heretofore 
above healthy amusements and Ag- 
nes Elliston, suddenly became a 
business man, after having been 
raised to become the idle heir to 
about three million dollars. Of 
course, having no kith nor kin in 
all this wide world, he went imme- 
diately to consult Agnes. It is 
quite likely that if he had been sup- 
plied with dozens of uncles and 
aunts he would have gone first to 
Agnes anyhow, having a mighty 
regard for her keen judgment, even 
though her clear gaze rested now 
and then all too critically upon him- 
self. 

Practice beginnings conscientiously, and 
your time will not be wasted, for when you 
have a good beginning you are almost cer- 
tain to build good stories. 

in 



Development 

I have attempted to show that an intro- 
duction should, above all things, in- 
clude in some way the idea of motion, 
and particularly visible motion; that the 
nature of the story should be foreshadowed 
in it, and that the plot should begin at 
once, without tedious explanation or de- 
scription. The development of the story 
must proceed with equal swiftness. Bear- 
ing constantly in mind the climax which 
makes your story worth telling, proceed to- 
ward it as soon as you have your ground- 
work laid, your characters introduced, and 
the minor episodes relating to introduction 
out of the way. It is not meant that you 
should leave out all the interesting details 
which go to the making of color. Write 
these as fully as you like, remembering 
that it is always easier to cut out than to 
supply new material, but be very sure, in 

112 



your revision, that you do not let stand 
any color which clogs the definite onward 
sweep of your narrative. 

Let me refer back to the tales of which 
the beginnings have been given in the pre- 
ceding pages, in order to show how simple 
is the outline of a short story. 

In "Selling a Patent," Mr. Wallingford 
persuades Mr. Klug that the way to sell a 
patent to a monopoly is to form a manufac- 
turing company, and by competition compel 
the monopoly to buy him out. He joins with 
Mr. Klug in the forming of this company 
and immediately proceeds to bankrupt it, 
forcing all its property and other valuable 
considerations, including the patent, to a 
sheriff's sale, in which he buys up the patent 
for "a song," having previously arranged to 
sell it to the monopoly at a good price. That 
is the skeleton. The means he employed, the 
various people with whom he associated, are 
the details, but the detail is never allowed to 
overshadow the story, which ends precisely 
upon the climax of Wallingford's securing 
possession of the patent. 

In "Skeezicks," through a whimsical con- 
"3 



versation with Uncle Joe, Skeezicks gains 
the idea of buying an engagement ring for 
a young lady of whom he thinks a great deal 
and with whom Uncle Joe is in love. Upon 
the eve of her departure for Europe, just as 
Uncle Joe is going to propose, he sees Skee- 
zicks* engagement ring, an imitation dia- 
mond, upon her finger. He has just met his 
rival coming away from the house and im- 
mediately jumps to the natural conclusion, 
upon which he remains silent. After she 
has gone away Skeezicks inadvertently lets 
slip the fact of his purchase of the ring, 
and Uncle Joe follows the young lady upon 
the next train. The story ends with a tel- 
egram, presumably signed by Skeezicks, 
which states that Uncle Joe is coming to 
trade rings. All there is to plot is told in 
the above sentences, but the story occupied 
an approximate seven thousand words in the 
telling. This was all color and contributory 
incident, every bit of which went toward the 
building up of the climax. 

In "The Strike Breaker'* the figure ap- 
proaching Tremont in the dark is Lanigan, 
a striker who wants to come back to work 
114 



as a "scab," though he is an ardent union 
man, because his wife and boy are sick. 
Tremont accepts him gladly, since his fight 
against the strikers is likely to fail because 
he can not get a competent engineer. Lani- 
gan comes into the factory, which is prac- 
tically in a state of siege, has his life heavily 
insured, becomes the backbone of Tremont's 
strike-breaking organization, and later, over- 
come by the thought of the want and misery 
which his action is causing the families of 
his brethren of the union ranks, resigns and 
goes out among the vengeful mob surround- 
ing the factory to explain that he has quit. 
He is shot by an enemy in the crowd. The 
story ends abruptly upon the death of Lani- 
gan, it being told long previously that his 
wife and child are well provided for and 
have moved to the country, amid healthy 
surroundings. That story, as published, 
counted ten thousand words, a length sel- 
dom permitted by any magazine. 

The next story, "Move On," is merely an 
episode wherein a man, reduced to the ranks 
of tramping because he is unable to find 
work within the scope of his ability, is com- 

"5 



pelled to move on, though starving and half 
frozen, from city to village and from village 
to farm, and from farm back to village and 
city, the climax coming when at last, a mis- 
erable outcast, and most forbidding and re- 
pellant-looking, he finds the man who, in his 
rough way, takes pity on him and makes 
him a human being again. There is scarcely 
any trace of plot to this, and yet it required 
five thousand words to form sufficient con- 
trast to make the climax of rest sufficiently 
strong. 

In "Fanchon the Lobster," a tale of ab- 
surdity, the lobster is made a pet by Pierre 
Piquard. A fellow countryman insists upon 
having that lobster cooked for his dinner. 
He forcibly seizes it and plunges it in a pot 
of boiling water. Pierre, the chef, then, out 
of revenge, prepares a sauce for the lobster 
which makes the incontinent diner die of 
acute indigestion. The diner was a stranger, 
and Pierre paid his funeral expenses so that 
he might go out on splendid Sunday morn- 
ings and lay wreaths of water-cress upon the 
grave of Fanchon. 

In "The Making of Bobby Burnit," Bobby 
116 



loses control of his father's business through 
a consolidation with a rival, a stock com- 
pany being formed and Bobby being voted 
out of an influential position, or even divi- 
dends on his holdings, because, in his igno- 
rance, he permitted his rival, who was also 
his father's old enemy, to obtain possession 
of a' majority of stock. Afterwards, with 
the help of his trustee, who proves to be 
Agnes Elliston, the girl with whom he is in 
love, he is able to regain control. This sen- 
tence tells exactly what he did, but how he 
did it is the interesting part. 

These brief examples are given to show 
the simplicity of plot to which a short story 
must necessarily be confined. If you have 
a story in mind, skeletonize it as briefly as 
these have been outlined before you begin; 
but it is not wise to attempt to minutely plan 
all the detail, for if you are fertile enough 
to write good stories at all, you will find 
that a curious psychological process begins 
almost as soon as you start to write; both 
your characters and your situations, more 
or less, act almost as if endowed with inde- 
pendent life and intelligence. They will ut- 

117 



terly refuse to follow the rigid lines you have 
laid down for them, and will work out side- 
plots and incidents and situations of their 
own. 

Suppose your story to be precisely as the 
last one mentioned; how a young man lost 
his business through lack of knowledge of 
stock company manipulation, and how he 
regained it with the assistance of his "best 
girl." You will have a more or less definite 
idea of the exact steps by which this is to 
be done, but when you have finished your 
story you will find it entirely different, in the 
majority of cases, from the one you set out 
to write. You may have followed your skel- 
eton exactly, but your detail will be very 
different from that which you intended, and 
if you are gifted at all in the writing way, 
the altered result will be much better than 
the original could have been. 



\ 



iig 



The Ending 

Above all things, quit when you are 
iJk through. Stop exactly on your cli- 
■*■ "^ max. If you deem it necessary to 
tell what became of your characters after 
the ending of the story, hint at it, or 
prophesy it, before you reach your dra- 
matic ending. Do not shoot off a solitary 
remaining Roman candle after you have 
displayed your grand, final set piece. 



119 



Description 

Some description is, of course, vitally 
necessary, but leave out all lengthy 
delineations of people, of places, of 
scenery. Scattered information about these 
through the story when they are positively 
needed, but sketch them in very briefly, sug- 
gesting just enough of general outline to 
let the imagination of the reader build up 
for himself the missing detail. If you must 
write description, write it. Be painstak- 
ing about it; show that your observation 
is keen and sympathetic; go over the work 
and polish it; get it so that it is really a 
poetic gem told in musical prose ; then, hav- 
ing gloated over it to your heart's content, 
throw it away. It is only a clog upon the 
swing of your narrative. 

The above, of course, refers to descriptive 
passages as applied to short story writ- 
zrig. If you mean to do descriptive writing 

120 



— if you have a strong natural inclination 
for it — that, of course, is a different matter. 
It is not meant here to decry descriptive 
writing, which is an art well worth culti- 
vating, but merely to insist that description 
of any length has no place in the short story. 
Every short story writer should be able to 
write minutely detailed description, if for 
no other reason, to be able to judge what 
to leave out in condensation. This is largely 
a matter of observation, of logical arrange- 
ment, and of rhetoric, and separate practice 
in this will well repay the effort. 



121 



General Observations 

Confine yourself as much as possible 
t to definite action, and to conversa- 
tion which is in itself both vital 
and interesting. Insert conversation very 
early in your pages. Some stories will 
not permit of this, but in the majority 
of cases if the first page of your manu- 
script contains no quotation marks, that 
is, no directly important speech delivered 
by one of your characters, you had best 
remodel your story to introduce conversa- 
tion much earlier. There is a good mechan- 
ical reason for this. A solid page of narra- 
tive, especially at the beginning, looks very 
dead to the reader. The eye, glancing down 
the page, however, will catch a short sen- 
tence set apart in quotation marks, and if 
that sentence is a virile one, the reader, 
glancing over the pages of the magazine 
with no intention whatever of reading every 

122 



article in it, will go back to the introduc- 
tion and begin the story which contains that 
virile sentence. It is legitimate to take ad- 
vantage of this trait in human nature. If 
you have a message to deliver and can not 
get a hearing for it, you might as well not 
be possessed of the message. You must re- 
member, too, that the same device which 
will catch the eye of the reader of a maga- 
zine will catch the eye of the person who 
reads your manuscript. It is a part of the 
art of story-telling to take advantage of all 
the little points which will render what you 
have to say more interesting. 

Do not indulge in philosophy or com- 
ment except very, very briefly, and only 
when necessary to explain character. Even 
then your drawing may be much better ac- 
complished by action or a terse bit of speech. 

Be sure that you are in earnest; be sure 
that you believe what you say; be sure that 
your story is true in every particular, true 
in logic, true in character-drawing, true to 
the best instincts that are in you. No hu- 
man being must be the worse for a line 

123 



that you write. If you have a gift you 
must not prostitute it. Perhaps all of us 
who have written have penned stories for 
which we are sorry, but if the constant at- 
tempt is put forward to produce the best 
there is in you, the general average is bound 
to tell, and the effort is certain to have its 
bearing upon your standing in the story- 
telling field. 



124 



Condensation 

This part of the "editing" is so im- 
portant that it has been deemed 
wise to consider it separately. 
After you have finished, go over your 
story and cut out ruthlessly every unneces- 
sary word, sentence, paragraph; every un- 
necessary page! Ask yourself, about each 
individual atom of your story, "Is this vi- j 
tally necessary to the painting of my pic- 
ttflre, the unfolding of my plot, the develop- 
ment of my climax ?" If it is not, cross it 
out. If you follow this rule strictly you 
will find that you have destroyed most of 
your pet passages, your flowery descrip- 
tions, your philosophical deductions, your 
keen character analyses, but you will prob- 
ably have saved your story from the waste- 
basket. Too much stress can not be laid 
upon this matter of condensation. More 

125 



good stories are probably ruined by begin- 
ners through the fault of diffuseness than 
through any other cause. 

It is not meant that anything vitally nec- 
essary or interesting should be cut out to 
make your story shorter, but only that the 
unnecessary things should be shorn away. 
Unnecessary descriptions, unnecessary con- 
versations, even unnecessary episodes will 
be found, upon careful editing. Some of 
these things you will think that you have 
expressed most neatly, and it will be diffi- 
cult for you to let them go, but subject them 
to the one rigid test of whether they are 
absolutely essential to the development of 
your story. If they are not, you might save 
them with the idea of using them in some 
place where they will be more apropos, but 
in any event do away with them. This, 
during your apprenticeship. Later, after 
you have gained facility and judgment and 
insight, you may take liberties with this 
rule and permit to remain passages and per- 
haps incidents not exactly needful, but that 
are in themselves attractive enough to pay 
for the space they take up; but your judg- 

126 



ment as to this, in the beginning, will not 
be very certain, and it is best to hold very 
rigidly to your main theme. If you become 
proficient in writing, and find a market for 
your ware, and stay in the profession per- 
manently, as the years pass on you will 
find yourself leaving out extraneous matter 
in the first writing, but it is almost impos- 
sible to do this at the start; there are too 
many temptations to take attractive by- 
paths. A good rule is to count the words 
after your story is written, cut out one- 
third, rewrite it so as to have clean copy, 
then cut out all you can additionally. 



127 



Length of Stories 

In this place the proper length of short 
stories might be mentioned. Seven 
thousand words, by a known writer, 
is the utmost limit that is permissible in 
the average magazine, and even then the 
story must be one of most exceptional 
merit; but it would be almost fatal to 
his prospects for the beginner to offer a 
story of over five thousand words. Three 
thousand is a much better length, and the 
amateur will find a more ready accept- 
ance for even a two-thousand-word tale. 
Almost any editor who would hesitate 
over a three or four-thousand-word manu- 
script would find space for one of equal 
merit of two thousand words, and be glad 
to get it; for there is a dearth of this length 
story. It requires much more skill to write 
an acceptable two-thousand- word story than 
one of seven thousand. Stories of from six 

128 



or seven hundred words to a thousand are 
also eagerly sought by many magazines 
which have a separate department for 
sketches of this length. These sketches are 
excellent practice, too. They should be con- 
fined merely to a dramatic climax and such 
absolutely necessary details as explain it 
and throw it into relief. Some few publica- 
tions will accommodate stories of almost 
any length if of exceptional merit. If they 
are too long they are run as two installment 
or even three installment stories, but the 
drawback to this is that the market is so 
restricted, and if the "Saturday Evening 
Post" and one or two other publications 
which use them should refuse your stories 
of exceptional length, they stay upon your 
hands; so it is best to hold rigidly in the 
beginning to an absolute four-thousand- 
word limit, keeping as much under that 
length as possible. 



129 



Editing 

This is of almost as much importance 
as the building of the story itself. 
Certain authors who turn out very 
careful and very highly polished work, edit 
and even rewrite their stories an infinite 
number of times. This is largely a tem- 
peramental matter. Writers with newspa- 
per training can scarcely be brought to 
do this, and in their case so many edit- 
ings and rewritings are seldom neces- 
sary, for the newspaper worker learns to 
edit as he goes. The writer of this trea- 
tise almost invariably has his stories typed 
three times. The first typing is edited 
I for both condensation and construction,, 
but it would be better for the amateur 
to do this in separate revision. The first 
writing should be studied very carefully 
for construction. It might be necessary to 
alter almost the entire plot, to leave out or 

130 



put in episodes, conversations, and descrip- 
tions. In the second editing the condensa- 
tion should be done. The third editing 
should be for polish, and in this the attempt 
should be made to improve all descriptions 
and conversations, to improve rhetoric and 
diction, to express every thought more clev- 
erly. A fourth transcription should then be 
made on good paper for mailing, and this, 
before it is sent away, should be gone over 
very carefully for typographical errors. No 
manuscript should leave your hand until it 
is letter and comma perfect. No typograph- 
ical slips, no careless typewriting should be 
permitted, for these things have their un- 
doubted influence. The question of how 
many times you are to edit a manuscript, 
however, depends entirely upon your nat- 
ural instinct and habit of accuracy, and the 
question is one which, after all, remains to 
be solved in practice, with perhaps a sepa- 
rate solution for each writer. 



131 



Preparing a Manuscript 

By all means typwrite your offerings. 
It would be very expensive to hire 
this done, and might also be an 
unwise investment; but small typewriters 
can be bought very cheaply, and it is no 
trick for any person with a trifle of pa- 
tience to learn to operate one with suffi- 
cient facility. Longhand stories, if leg- 
ibly written, will be read, but the easier 
you can make it for the manuscript reader 
in the editorial office the more favorably 
he will feel toward your offering. Of 
course you will write only upon one side of 
the paper, whether you are preparing your 
manuscript in longhand or on a typewriting 
machine. If the latter, double-space your 
"copy," to allow of interlineations, and leave 
a reasonably wide margin. Write your 
name and address upon the first sheet, and 
put the page number upon every page, to- 

132 



gether with the title of the story, so that if 
the sheets become separated it will be easier 
to identify them and reinsert them in their 
proper places in the manuscript. It is not 
advisable to tack manuscript together by 
clips or fasteners of any sort. I have sent 
out hundreds of manuscripts, and have never 
fastened any of them together, and have 
never had a sheet lost from any of them. 
The reason for not binding them is that 
manuscripts are most conveniently handled 
by reading the first page and slipping it be- 
hind the last one, reading the second page 
and slipping that behind the first one, and 
so on, so that after the last page has been 
read and slipped behind the pack, the en- 
tire manuscript remains first page up, as it 
was before. 

The rule about "mailing flat" has been 
promulgated so often by publishers that, by 
this time, it would seem everybody should 
know better than to roll a manuscript. 
From the experience of the writer, however, 
in handling the "copy" of amateurs, all peo- 
ple do not know this. Rolled manuscripts 
will not be read. They will be returned 

*33 



without comment, no matter how good the 
story is. If you want to know the reason 
for this send away a rolled manuscript. 
After it comes back from its two weeks of 
tightly cramped wandering, try to hold it 
open and read it, and you will discover this 
to be almost a physical impossibility. Edi- 
tors and manuscript readers are very busy 
men, and they have not the time to struggle 
with follies of this sort. 

Use paper of the regulation size, approx- 
imately eight and one-half by eleven inches, 
and fold it, if you wish to save postage, the 
proper size to go in a "legal" envelope. A 
better plan is to fold it over just once. You 
can secure, very cheaply, stout Manila en- 
velopes of just the right size to accommodate 
these half-folded sheets. When mailing a 
manuscript in this way, a sheet of paste- 
board, cut to the right size, should be en- 
closed within it, unless the manuscript is 
rather stiff, to keep it from bending and to 
keep the corners from curling over. Still a 
better plan is to send the manuscript per- 
fectly flat, without folding at all. Envelopes 

134 



of the proper size for this may be secured at 
almost any stationer's shop, and sheets of 
pasteboard, cut to the same size as the manu- 
script, should be placed front and back, 
slight rubber bands being placed around the 
whole before insertion into the envelope. 
This insures that your manuscript, clean 
and unbent, will lie before the manuscript 
reader as neatly as it lies before you after 
you have finished it, and the psychology of 
this fresh appearance is of just as much 
value as if you went in to see a business 
man neat and clean in place of rumpled and 
unwashed. You produce a favorable impres- 
sion upon him in the first place, and then 
if you have anything worth while to say, 
you have secured an audience prejudiced in 
your favor. For this reason, after the re- 
turn of a manuscript examine it critically, 
and if it shows the least sign of wear, re- 
copy it before you send it out again. This 
seems a lot of work, but it pays. 

Be sure that you prepay full first-class 
postage, and enclose a like amount in a sep- 
arate small envelope, the latter marked on 

135 



the outside with the information that it con- 
tains stamps to a certain amount accompa- 
nying such and such a story. Do not write 
the editor a letter telling him how good the 
story is. Any letter to an editor, unless he 
has already accepted some of your stories, 
or unless you know him personally, is en- 
tirely useless. Your offering will rest 
strictly upon its own merits. Have your 
name and address on the first page of the 
story; that is sufficient. The editor knows 
to whom to return it if he can not use it, 
or whom to pay in case he accepts it. 

After you have your manuscript ready to 
mail go over it once more. You may find 
a place to substitute a better word for one 
already used, to alter, at the last moment, 
a phrase or a speech so that it will be more 
to the point. You will invariably find some 
commas that should have been left out or 
places where some should be inserted; you 
will find one or more misspelled words, due 
to haste in writing, possibly, and other lit- 
tle defects the correction of which will make 
your offering more perfect. It might even 

136 



strike you that an entire page, or two or 
three pages, should be rewritten. If so, do 
not spare the pains, for in the long run this 
care will pay you large dividends. No busi- 
ness, and story-writing is a business, ever 
succeeded without a minute and painstaking 
attention to details. 



137 



Marketing 

When your effort is ready, try to 
market it. Do not pay any at- 
tention to the criticism of your 
friends ; do not bother them with your work. 
They do n't know anything about it, and if 
they did could not tell you. The only critic 
for whose opinion you need at all care is 
the public, and that public is fairly well un- 
derstood by the men who buy manuscript. 
Make up your mind to this fact ; you will 
receive absolutely fair treatment. There is 
no "clique" in the publishing business, and 
it does not require a "pull" to obtain recog- 
nition. I can not understand how this silly 
idea of favoritism came about, unless it was 
evolved by unsuccessful writers to soothe 
their own sense of chagrin. I have met 
most intimately nearly every editor in the 
United States and have talked shop with 
them, not only in their offices but in their 
clubs, over luncheons and dinners, and I am 

138 



quite sure that there is no other business or 
profession in the world which is more 
frankly and honorably and openly con- 
ducted. The only passport you need to the 
courtesies and good graces of publishers is 
to have written a good story, one that is 
true in its analysis and protrayal of human 
life. They are on the lookout all the time 
for wholesome stories written entertainingly 
and from a fresh angle, and once that story 
is written, the entire profession extends to 
you the right hand of fellowship and wel- 
comes you among the elect. Aside from the 
search for a new point of view, for fresh 
treatment in handling, the magazines are 
quite anxious to secure new writers because, 
for the same grade or sometimes even a bet- 
ter grade of stories, they pay the unpam- 
pered ones much less than they do those 
who have made their reputations. It is pre- 
cisely the old law of supply and demand, as 
potent here as it is in the sugar and salt 
trade and I personally know that every 
physically presentable manuscript is read, 
not only dutifully but eagerly, in all the 
magazine offices. 

139 



Be careful not to go to the wrong mar- 
ket. Magazines are as different as people, 
and what suits one will not suit another. 
Study the different publications, and try to 
decide to which one your story will be most 
acceptable. The sort of material they are 
already using is the sort they want. It 
would be absurd to try to sell opera-glasses 
to a blind man for his own use. 

Do not be discouraged! When your 
manuscript comes back it will no doubt be 
accompanied by a printed slip of rejection. 
This is the only criticism you may expect, 
but it will be sufficient; you will know that 
the story was not what was wanted. Study 
it over, compare it with the stories that are 
published in that magazine, and try to find 
out why yours was not good enough. If 
you find that point, eliminate it, and send out 
your manuscript again and again and again, 
going from the top down to the bottom of the 
list of the more than thirty magazines now 
buying material at prices which make writ- 
ing worth while. My own first accepted 
story went a weary round and brought a 
ridiculously small price. My second I sent 

140 



to seven magazines before it was finally 
taken, but it earned me five times as much 
as the first. My stories now do almost no 
traveling, and they bring me exactly forty 
times as much as my first one, which, if you 
stop to think it over, is a very fair explana- 
tion of why the magazines are anxious to 
find new writers. 

If you can secure a foothold at all, the 
business is quite profitable enough to en- 
gage your earnest attention. Within the 
year following the acceptance of your first 
two or three stories your earnings will prob- 
ably be large enough for you to give up any 
other occupation and devote your time ex- 
clusively to writing. You will be paid a 
very small rate at first, but the rate is raised 
very rapidly if your work remains uniformly 
good. When your price comes up to five 
cents a word you may call your earnings an 
income, for you will be receiving from five 
to ten thousand dollars a year, the mere fact 
that you are obtaining the five-cent rate, 
which is a very good one, insuring that your 
work is enough in demand to keep you busy. 
On top of this income, which, by the way, 

141 



like an income in any other business, is only 
to be earned by continuous application, by 
the keeping of regular office hours as it were, 
there are the possibilities of book publication 
and of dramatic rights ; and success in these 
fields means a comfortable fortune. 

What I have set down here comes as the 
result of years of hard "grinding;" I only 
hope that the result may be to make the 
path easier for others. There is plenty of 
room in the profession; come on up and be 
one of us. If I knew of anything else help- 
ful to say to you, I would say it, gladly. I 
can do no better, or no more, I think, than 
to recapitulate: 

First, prepare to earn a living at some- 
thing else for a time. 

Second, test yourself thoroughly to see 
if you have the necessary qualifications for 
the profession. 

Third, Work! Work all the time, be- 
fore, during, and after your first success. 
Just work. I wish I could make you realize 
to the full just what it means to WORK! 



142 



no 



G 1 1912 



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